Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

ICO drops BT, ACS Law probe

Lets BP off the hook though

It wasn't their fault - an employee installed the blowout preventer

Canada? The computer vendor says no

Canadian Dollars at Amazon

On a similar note - does anyone know where I can buy some of the Canadian dollars they have at Amazon?

In the real world a CDN$ costs slightly more than a US$ - whereas on Amazon they seem to be only worth 50c

UK.gov doesn't know its IT spend – but insists it will spend less

@Obvious questions

>_Will they start_ monitoring total IT spend?

Yes, the new department of IT spend (with a budget of 5Bn) will start a tendering process with CapGemini / Accenture / BAe / a chap in my house at school - to develop a system to track IT spending. The project is proposed to cost another 10Bn but they are sure that they can manage savings once it is actually installed then specified.

Gates: Killing the internet is easy

@Questions

>to BT to turn off _its_ network access, can BT really say NO?

To be fair BT would say of course. Then not get round to it. Then leave a note saying we wanted to cut off your internet but you were out. Then they would install new digital TV in Belgium by mistake.

Cisco promises half a billion dollars for Cameron's BIG idea

@Good News

> which doesn't necessarily mean hard cash as Cisco equipment and services could be provided at less than list price.

Like when Microsoft ran foundation schools - it invested millions of $ - in the form of ACLs and the local authority merely paid for the buildings and the teachers.

So local council will pay for the call centre - in tax breaks, grants and 'training investment' - CISCO will charge itself $500M for installing it's own services and a government minister gets his picture in the paper.

ARM Holdings eager for PC and server expansion

Server yes but Windows Server?

I can see ARM in web/disk servers - why do I have to have a XEON sitting there cooking my Server because thats my only choice if I want 8 drive bays or dual gig-e?

Having the 'Server' be a single board the size of a few Sata sockets and a couple of RJ-45s pulling less power than the drives would be nice.

Not convinced by running Windows on it. I can run a web server on ARM with Linux and Apache very well now. If I need W2003 server IIS, SQL-Server and Exchange then I'm probably talking about a fairly heavy machine - so swapping a XEON + 24Gb of ram + all the other junk for a bunch of ARM, 24Gb of Ram and all the other junk doesn't seem to save me much overall.

LCD pushbutton sunglasses issued to US Navy SEALs

Response time

Welding helmets have to darken in 1/20,000 second to meet CE - they typically take 0.1 - 0.5 seconds to clear.

Google algorithm change squashes code geek 'webspam'

product names

Another trick is to add +problems or +faults to the end of the product name to get the real review site

Sci/tech doctorate protects you from unemployment – in the US

It's worse when you get hired

If you are a techie at a UK company you will stay at the lab bench (or in front of a compiler) only accountants and lawyers get to be managers. Last place I worked in the UK only one scientist made it to own office status - and only because he worked in sales.

In the US the chairman of the board and CEO are both scientists. We work mostly with German and Korean clients where everybody at the top are technical experts - imagine having a car company headed by mechanical engineers or a chip maker headed by manufacturing engineers, those crazy foreigners !

UK.gov 'HyperHighway' aims to 'speed up the internet by 100x'

A Bargain

For only 7million quid they are planning to reinvent the optical, fibre, the nature of light, develop photonics routers and develop new materials with 100x the throughput - at least thats what their grant application claims.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:a8_SWnCrhZoJ:gow.epsrc.ac.uk/ViewGrant.aspx%3FGrantRef%3DEP/I01196X/1+Photonics+HyperHighway&cd=4&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca&source=www.google.ca

With net unplugged, Egypt cracks down on journos

Need to crack down on these terrorists

>A CNN crew... reported having their camera seized

How tall was the photographer?

Sat-spotters find secret payload launched by giant US rocket

@Google Streetview

Because you have to let the streetview cars into the country - which would mean that the country had to be friendly to you before you invaded.

So you would only be able to invade countries that used to be your staunch muslim allies in the fight against the evils of communism and are now evil muslim dictators in the fight against terrorism.

Antique Nimrod subhunters scrapped – THANK GOODNESS!

@Yes But

There will be a new long range drone., which although not able to drop supplies or lifeboats will at least video them for youtube.

Videogame TRAINS TERRORISTS, yells pundit

Training

Why blow yourself up ?

1, make bomb

2, put bomb in luggage

3, leave luggage with bomb in unsecured area

4, leave before bomb blows up

See that's what happens when you pop out of the briefing before the last powerpoint slide.

Utah to honour Browning M1911 semi-automatic

There are lots more states

Shouldn't they all have a state weapon? Then they could play top trumps

Single complaint sparks police raid and total ban on rental movie

Blame Canada

Here in the land of the beaver (next door to the land of the free) a single complaint got Dire Strait's "money for nothing" banned across the country.

Apparently "that little f*gg*t with the earing and the makeup" caused offense to a single person in Newfoundland.

@why have a BBFC at all?

It's a long running sociology experiment started in the 80s to see if video nasties cause violence.

If James Ferman - who presumably has seen more nasty scenes than anyone in the country - goes on a lust fueled chainsaw driven murder rampage, then we know watching naughty videos are bad for you. If he ends up in the house of lords we know they aren't.

Tory MP accidentally endorses... German pr0n site

@this could happen to you

It's not a coincidence.

The domain on our old company name ran out - the hosting company immediately put a gay porn site at that address and kept sending us letters about how it wasn't too late to renew - at ever increasing prices.

Obviously no blackmail was intended

Rescue mission begins for Hitchhiker's Real Guide

/sell/ it to us? How's that work, then?

So was British Rai and British Airways but you just try and borrow a train or a plane and see the fuss they make

Passenger cleared after TSA checkpoint stare-down

The more you check the same id the safer it is.

Show passport to check in to get boarding pass - this is nothing to do with security but just to stop me buying/selling tickets.

At the entrance to security show id and boarding pass. In theory I suppose this is to check that the names match, but since the boarding pass is printed out on my computer at home from my email this isn't exactly mil spec.

Show id + boarding pass to person deciding which security line to go to, then to person pushing my stuff along the belt through the machine, then to the person working the metal detector, then to the person taking my stuff off the belt. That's 4 people all with 15 feet of each other all wanted to check my id and boarding pass!

Could these people be doing something better for security?

Like checking baggage handlers, cleaners or food carts?

Perhaps for improved security each of these people could ask to see my boarding pass twice - then it would be twice as secure!

Utilitybidder gets disconnected by developer

@Love the style ...

Small line in the contract - 'goods remain property of XXX until paid for in full'

Beeb say sorry for Stephen Fry A-bomb quip

Japanese railways didn't complain

The joke also included the part that guy took a train from Hiroshima to Nagasaki. Fry pointing out that the morning after an A-bomb lands on your city and after 5years of war - the trains were still running!

Philips 21:9 Cinema 58in LED backlit TV

@Maybe I'm wrong, but

Every film you watch on this will have had it's RGB colours compressed into YCbCr, throwing away half the red and blue information, then chopped into 8x8 pixel blocks, then interpolated from frames before and after it, the fourier transformed then have all the fine detail coefficents thrown away

Rescaling it to 20:9 is the least bad thing that happens to it !

India's cheap-as-chips delayed by cash spat

@Anyway

Thad - you don't understand.

The first step to becoming a developed western economy is for your political leaders to announce grand national IT projects that will deliver huge service improvements to the public at low cost.

The second step is for the whole project to collapse under huge overspends, under-delivery and bribe scandals.

End of the line for ID cards

@Why destroy the drives?

Option 1: erase drive with software.

Takes skilled operator (able to read = skilled these days) 15-30mins to do each machine

But drive was: faulty OR weirdly partioned OR in some complex raid array that the wipe software didn't understand OR had data stored on bad partitions that were mapped out by the drive controller.

Only discover this when classified data shows up in the bad guys lab.

Option 2:

Destroy the drives, desktop 320Gb drives are about $50

For Id card it doesn't matter - anybody daft enough to sign up for an Id card probably writes their PIN on their facebook page - but the procedure is the same for data that does matter.

Raygun dreadnought project reports 'remarkable breakthrough'

@One thing to remember about shiny defense

That goes both ways of course.

Unless you are intending to put the entire laser lab on a turret and have it track and point at an incoming supersonic target from a rolling ship - then you are going to have to feed the laser beam to a tracking telescope - with mirrors.

The real pain in high power laser tech is keeping the mirror surfaces intact. Even at kW levels you need carefully matched interference coatings, spotless cleanrooms and water cooled mirrors. Even them you need to replace the mirrors regularly

Piping a MW beam from the bowels of a ship to a tracking turret telescope is going to be 'interesting'. Of course thats just an engineering detail that the scientists don't need to worry about.

Wind turbine bonanza expected in Hull

@Assembly Plant?

Depends what you are assembling.

If it's just shipping dissembled windmills in on one boat and lifting them onto other boats to be planted off the UK and so count as UK windfarms - that's one thing.

If it's bringing in blades and steel tubes but assembling them in Hull, thats skilled millwright jobs.

More privacy for the Queen, less for everyone else

@Another Canadian

But without the Queen, either President Harper (shudder) would have simply prorogued parliament himself, or if you have the German system an unknown civil servant figure-head President would have done it for him.

You can't win, the governor general of Oz called a new election because half the government were in jail and the other half were heading there. This lead to lots of complaints about the queen interfering.

ACPO - so what

Officially published ACPO advice to government or police offices will now be available under FoI.

Quiet words had with the chief constable or home secretaries at lodge meetings won't.

Lame Stuxnet worm 'full of errors', says security consultant

Government involvement confirmed

When it was originally discovered the headline was something like "it's advanced complexity suggests it was written by government agencies"

To anyone who has ever dealt with IT in government agencies this was pretty unbelievable.

So the new headline - "totally amateurish suggest it was written by government agencies" is rather more believable.

Police DNA test plan to put off prostitutes' punters

So they admit it

" If you know that ....., your DNA was going to be taken you might think again"

So they are admitting that taking your DNA, when innocent, is intended as a punishment ?

Hackers eyed sale of celebrity iPad data

re: Protected

There have been cases where somebody just typing in a url directly being regarded as hacking = unauthorized access to a computer.

Somebody guessed that the answers to next weeks competition were at website/next-weeks-date/answer.html and won a prize.

Apple without Jobs: Who's next?

Succession

I assumed the first engineer to pull the battery from the sacred iPod 'excalibur' becomes king of the Apples

Tablets to eclipse e-book readers

@So what happens.

Colour is easy (at least low end color) the problem is speed.

An e-ink display isn't going to be scrolling text or handling mouse pointers any time soon.

Then there's the problem of input. Leaving off the touch screen - especially a resistive one - makes the display a lot clearer

Apples to - well kindles

It is a fair comparison, the only real ebook reader is the Kindle and the only tablet worth having in the last year is the iPad.

People look at a $200 kindle and think, well for $500 I could have an iPad that does colour and movies and t'internet. Your average iPad/Kindle buyer at the moment is the early adopter (aka flash-git) who isn't short of the odd $300.

There's also the problem of supply, to get a kindle for xmas here you had to have pre-ordered when it was announced in September, and no sneakily buying one from the US and trying to ship it.

When kindle does colour (the prototype is good enough to read comics) and you can buy Android tablets for $200 the race will be on.

Who are the biggest electric car liars - the BBC, or Tesla Motors?

Top gear has the answer

Well from the series of scientific experiments conducted by the BBC's very own motoring brains trust.

I seem to remember if you want to get across London you should run (marathon runner beats car). If you want to go to the south of France you drive rather than fly and if you want to get to the North pole you should take a dog sled. And if you want to get down various mountains then mountain bikes, snow mobiles or parachutes all won.

Greyhats had up for AT&T iPad celebrity backdoor slurp breach

Criminal charges

For AT&T for not exercising due diligence over their customers confidential data?

Galileo euro-satnav 'driven by French military', says sacked CEO

Just to clear up a few things

There is still an encrypted second military GPS signal.

Having two frequencies lets you cancel out some atmospheric effects to get better accuracy - it also helps you spot some forms of spoofing.

ICBMs do not rely on GPS, simply because the first way you now you are in a proper grown up war with the Rooskies is that all your GPS sats suddenly get destroyed.

There was a project to fit GPS to Trident5 to make it a non (or very low yield) - nuclear sub-strategic system to take out heavily defended targets but it got officially cancelled (although may still be running) . The problem is that it makes some very big northern neighbours slightly nervous if you start lunching things from subs over their air space to hit some tinpot dictator in the middle east.

The reason for Galileo is to backhand Eu aerospace companies - that's also the purpose of 99% of the Eu countries militaries, if anybody doesn't know this I have a bridge to sell them in London.

It does have it's uses though. Suppose the US decided in the next trade war, or if we refused their next invitation to democratize some country, the US reduced civil GPS accuracy over Europe to 50-100m would that inconvenience anybody?

I seem to remember a similar Mr Page arguing for keeping Loran open for just this reason.

Will Windows on ARM sink Windows Phone 7?

Designing an OS for phones

Back in the Psion3 days I was trying to explain the difference to a windows CE fan. If you have a document in CE and copy some text you have 2 copies of the text vs one in Epoc.

Now with 'real' windows on our phone you will also have another copy of the doc 'on disk' and a 4th copy in the hiberfile to allow the phone to sleep.

There is a slight difference between an always non-volatile memory phone and an OS designed around a disk operating system.

Ace Reg reporter in career suicide shock

Torygraph surprisingly good on tech

They were the first to put the whole issue online and have good tech sections.

Unlike the Gruniad's belief that trying to look liked WiReD makes an article readable.

My theory is that a bunch of tech hacks came back drunk form CES, went to the wrong paper, discovered the TG has a good canteen and set up home.

Since the management and the retired colonel readers always skip that section they haven't been discovered yet.

Google Apps contracts promise no 'scheduled downtime'

No scheduled downtime?

Rather like promising that our planes will be more reliable since they are never taken out for maintenance - any promises on UNscheduled downtime ?

Otellini yawns at Windows on ARM

It's not news

There is more to making Windows work for tablets than simply porting to ARM.

You have to assume that both MSFT and Intel know this - unless they are both total idiots.

It's like the joke from 20years ago, MSFT invent a voice controlled computer.

At the demo Bill walks upto the microphone and says " see colon slash command dot com enter"

Without Meyer, what will AMD do next?

Wii

The Wii uses an IBM powerPC and an ARM - although it does have a fairly low end ATI graphics chip

Same problem as microsoft

So AMD was busy competing with it's traditional rival in an area that is rapidly becoming less important.

It's like MSFT congratulating itself on beating Linux on the desktop - while busily ignoring phones and tablets

DUP website translated into Irish by mischievous hacktivist

@Just don't get it

I think thats the point, if the language act required all government services to be bilingual that would reserve a lot of government jobs for one half of the community.

Here in Canada, the government is officially bilingual. But since 'english' canadians typically have about as much french language ability as english people in the UK it means a lot of government jobs are effectively reserved for french canadians. Totally coincidentally this buys a lot of votes in Quebec.

It also leads to public farces such as federal workers to help new Chinese immigrants in Vancouver being required to speak French but not necessarily speak Chinese.

Microsoft to hire 4,000 in UK

BizSparks

So they are going to sell developers subscriptions and claim that these startups were jobs they created?

Bond 23 back on track for 2012

CGI Solution

Why not leave the stunts real but CGI Bond?

Then you could have somebody that could act - and you wouldn't have to replace them every few films when their salary demands got too high

Top CEOs agree: US is down the crapper

CEOs

One big difference between the US/UK and Germany is the financial system.

i have worked in public companies where the CEO has burned major projects and big customers because it was more important to have a positive message for a city analyst this week than a profit next year

Good job the problem is only in the USA

I mean Britain would never fall into the trap of keeping out foreign expertise for purely political reasons and thanks to our students getting exponentially better grades each year our universities can hardly cope with the numbers of brilliant scientists and engineers.

When one oligopoly screws another

It doesn't happen in the UK

I have always found UK prices for brand name electronics to be at parity with the US retail price - that is 1 £ = 1 $