Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

119 iPad apps for admins, coders and geeks

Syntax error

"builds form an another class" (sic)

You have to worry if this is how well they proof-read the screenshot for the app.

Japanese press step into execution chamber

@Crime

That Japan doesn't have juries and has a pretty much 100% conviction rate helps.

Prudish Google slammed for Aussie censorship

@Lesson learned

That banning your political opponents while claiming that you are doing it for the children can keep you in power for a long time.

PA school district avoids charges over webcam spy scandal

@Lower Merion Webcam Scandal

>the real issue is that

The real issue is that the parents and kids can't trust the school district anymore.

Kids bring home laptop - you don't allow them to use it, the next 'administrative tool' might be checking your other home computers for illegal files?

School wants to give your daughter german measles vaccinations - do you trust them?

Do you need your kids to check for cameras in the locker room?

Single downloads big deal for UK comms industry

There are still artists left?

I thought my home taping of top-of-the-pops in the 80s already killed music?

HMRC staff fired for racism over benefits

@As it's Belfast

I suppose it's progress that the good people of Norn-Iron are now discriminating on the basis of skin color like normal people instead of worrying about transubstantiation.

Google plots pre-Christmas Chrome OS iPad killer

low-cost

So save on the $300-500 list price of an iPad by signing up to a 3year $100/month 3G contract ?

People have no bloody idea about saving energy

Reuising glass

The posh supermarket here sells its organic milk in glass bottles (at twice the price) and the bottles have a $1 deposit and are refilled.

Still uses more energy to wash the bottles and reuse them than to make a paper tetrapak carton and a lot more fuel to carry them around.

UK.gov drops Home Access scheme

Why not iPads?

Since each iPad saves 90K in printing costs - if we gave every kid one shouldn't we be able to cancel the national debt overnight?

BlackBerry bows to Saudi Arabia

@but why if...

It doesn't - if you are a foreign company doing biz in SA then either they ignore you, assuming you are paying the appropriate commissions to local advisors, or tell you to hand over the details anyway,

This is no different form the deal RIM and every network operator has with the UK, USA, and any other country with a police force.

This is about not letting the locals do deals, avoid tax and organise democracy without the local secret service being able to tap it - like they do in the UK, USA and .....

Hot babes discriminated against by some employers

@50-50 split

For most IT depts I'd settle for 50% human

US starts charging for online visa-waiver

@So let me get this straight

Not quite, you still have to fill in the green form, this is just an online version of the green form that might one day replace it - if they ever manage to get their systems lined up.

The problem is that the green form gets collected when you leave - under the new system you would need to go through a new layer of US immigration at the departure gate so they could record that you left the country,

Then you have the problem at land borders where there is no US immigration on leaving, now you just mail them the green form when it's expired. With the new efficient electronic system they have to build immigration posts at the exit as well as the entrance to record you leaving.

UK.gov finally kills ContactPoint

@Why so many and why so much

>Why did this system have to record all children in the UK to identify those recorded as being at risk?

The caring 'professionals' attitude that you are all guilty of something, even if it's just the possiblilty that you might do something. That's why we need to store the DNA of innocent people - just in case.

>Why did it cost £230 Million to develop a basic system to store names and addresses

Usual budget wrangling. Everybody wants a nice shiny new computer - you have a new big budget contract to stick the PO on.

You have been told to cut costs, so all your IT staff, maintenance contracts, HVAC, etc now get attached to the new big shiny contract.

You save costs, a big project becomes bigger and more important ..repeat.

Amazon opens UK Kindle store doors to teeming hordes

@Great in theory

>I've bought a handful of ebooks from the Kindle US store and they contain missing characters

Mostly 'U's perhaps?

They also seem to be completely missing any humour or irony !

Naomi Campbell admits handling 'blood diamonds'

Blood oil?

"Blood diamonds" is a marketing campaign by De Beers in S. Africa to stop people buying the competition. The same De Beers that cared so much about poor Africans it had nothing to do with the previous S. African regime.

Perhaps BP could start a similar campaign against middle easter oil?

Persuading people to only buy 'freedom oil' from the Gulf of Mexico or the North Sea?

Leicester Council's iPad can chair meetings

@Cost effective

Of course if the council staff are doing that many meetings - and no other work, somebody might suggest a more realistic way of saving 90,000

Stealth fighter in Canadian Wikipedia brouhaha

@F-35 can do Catapult launches

Catapults need steam, which means reactors, which means:

1, the French get to build the engines rather than RR+BAe

2, you can't sell any of them to foreigners - except foreigners who already have nuclear powered aircraft carriers, and they aren't going to want a sub-compact version.

@What are the rules for this in Canada

Meanwhile an investigation continues into the possibility that someone in the Harper government can read and write. When found, this dangerous intellectual will be punished.

Scotland Yard cuffs six in megaquid phish ring probe

Losses of £358,000

If they added 6 zeros they would have been bailed-out instead of refused-bailed

Court slaps down coppers in photography case

@Properly nasty individuals.

"regularly attending .... protests should expect to be of the interest to the state."

A mere murderer or rapist isn't of interest to the state.

Remember the MET isn't a local police force, it's part of government answerable to the home secretary

Microsoft should starve on radical penguin diet

Windows7 on a touchscreen

Remember the spoof ad back in the 90s that Microsoft had developed a speech interface to the PC?

The guy sits down at the PC and starts to speak:

see - colon - space - command - dot - com - return .....

US law to neuter libel tourism

Thank god for terrorists!

So a bunch of terrorists (sorry founding fathers) kicked the British out and now 240years later save the British public from the British courts!

Supercomputer geek builds Cray-1 around home PC

Performance

Nominal Cray1 performance was about 125MFlops, in theory you could double that with parallelism if everything lined up (and the moon was in the correct phase).

By comparison this i7 can supposedly do 110Gflops and if all the parallelism worked the Nvidia graphics card in it (GTX480) can do > 1.3 Teraflops .

Funniest computer comment I ever had, on a run report from a Cray YMP.

"The cray reported memory errors during this shift - please check your results"

What by hand? If I could calculate the results any other way - I wouldn't need the Cray.

Papal crackdown on bare-kneed tourists sparks hypocrisy claims

Dress code

They have a point, throughout history generally the ones in nice shiny uniforms have been the good guys while a few scruffy weirdos in a bedsheet and sandals have caused all sorts of trouble.

UK.gov's phone and net snooping hits record high

@Blimey, they missed one

So in order for the government to spy on you - they just need the approval of the guy in government in charge of spying on you!

Police chief: Yes, my plods sometimes forget photo laws

The "Stephenson defence"

Can this now be known as the Stephenson defence?

As in: I'm sorry m'lud but the members of my firm can't always be relied on to remember the rules on sawn-off shotguns when entering the bank.

Canadian flyboy prangs CF-18 Hornet

@Let the Canuck-baiting commence

>ordinarily these McDD jets are, arguably, the most capable combat jet type currently in service

That's the canuck's problem - they have just agreed to buy a gazillion $ worth of the latest US F35.

Which since their only conceivable enemies are a bunch of guys on donkeys and a large country to the south that makes the F35 it's looking a bit difficult to justify - especially when the CF18 is so good.

Looks like they came up with a way to claim on the insurance.

Hands up who hasn't accidentally dropped an old laptop to get a new one.

Cutbacks strip speed cameras from Blighty's roads

Money spinners

Some are money spinners. Mostly the ones on empty stretches of dual carriageway that make a couple of million/year from catching people speeding on an empty road at 4:00am.

Some are more expensive to install and operate, and don't catch as many people - like ones in built-up areas or in front of schools.

Guess which ones are going to be cut.

3D films fall flat

@The Last Airbender

To be fair that was one of the worst movies of all time.

It's a little like saying that audiences don't want location movies any more after "Ishtar"

SOCA 'faces axe'

@British FBI

So the organisation ended up ignoring serious organised crime while pursuing witch hunts for imaginary groups of millions of ordinary people committing a thought crime the media and hence politicians don't like.

It was more interested in the financial and political advancement of it's boss than protecting the public and managed to alienate local law enforcement.

Well you can't say you weren't warned.

ps. have we discovered if the director wears a dress yet?

London bike hire scheme suffers pre-launch wobbles

@You're Presenting It Wrong

Based on Montreal's success they are introducing it here.

It's going to cost $20M for 1000 bikes.

Trouble is that helmets are mandatory here, and heavily policed - the police tripled their number of fines during bike to work week. So the system relies on somebody wandering through dowwtown carrying a bike helmet but who doesn't own a bike.

Hitachi hides Magic Wand vibrator under a bushel

Field of Dreams

If you build it - they will come ?

Perv scanner code of practice still a balls-up

@Seriously

Interesting point that - if you dropped your pants in the security queue you would be nicked for indecency and yet the same images of you (or your kids) taken by a machine aren't indecent.

Apple 'stunned' by iProduct demand

@ famousringo

The famous example being Acorn, building up huge stocks of machines for the christmas AFTER the home computer boom ended destroyed the company.

Raptor over Blighty: Watch the stealth fighter in infrared

Asymetric combat

Good guys: A $Bn fighter aircraft capable of evading any other $Bn fighter aircraft

Bad guys: A road side bomb that kills the pilot

Some general said - the ultimate fate of the USAF would be that they would finally spend a $100Bn on the perfect invincible aircraft and a bit of the hanger roof would collapse and destroy it !

UK's Watchkeeper drone 'can see footprints through cloud'

@but even the footprints they leave in the dirt

Now if only it could tell if those were the footprints of a 12ft fire-breathing evil terrorist or just somebody on their way to a wedding - before dropping bombs on them. Then it might have some use.

Bubble-baron Bigelow bags Boeing boosters

@ravenvis

>But what do they get from going into space?

What do they get from jumping out of aeroplanes attached to giant hankies, or riding bikes into corners with their knees scrapping the ground.

ps. The FAA / CAA rules only apply if you launch from the UK/USA. Since both these countries are somewhat north of the equator, have governments with lots of red tape and an inconvenient attitude to giving visas to some of your more unconventionally entrepreneurial billionaire customers - you might be better off launching from somewhere cheaper in the Caribbean or SE Asia with a more relaxed attitude to government regulation

NASA drops Ubuntu's Koala food for (real) open source

@What's the issue with OpenCore

It depends - done right (like MySQL or Qt) dual licensing works, it provides income to develop the free stuff and has corporate acceptance.

But opencode can also mean Tivo-ilisation, which is what this seems like. The core engine was open but you couldn't effectively manage it or run a lot of stuff on it without the commercial add-ons.

German webcam hack perv suspect cuffed

@Whut?

Yep, the school's software even went as far as disabling the camera-active warning LED.

But of course the machine was the school's property, somebody clicked OK on the license to agree to this in the small print and, well, children aren't really people are they? So no problem.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/02/19/school_laptop_spy_row/

Cable lays plan for graduate tax

@Don't they pay more if they earn more?

The 100K figure is very suspect. It's based on people currently at the end of their careers, so who went to uni in the 60s when 10% of the population went.

It's really an indication that some jobs that pay lots (doctor, lawyer etc) require degrees.

It doesn't mean that somebody who gets a degree and then an average office job will earn 100K more than somebody who started in the same office job with A levels.

ps. Of course what this means is that the best thing to do after your degree is immediately leave the country. Anyone know any other countries that speak English and pay people twice as much and have a big shortage of technical graduates ?

NHS loses massive Microsoft licensing rebate

@Training

Not sure all the 1.5m employees are using life or death software everyday.

The important stuff, the stuff in ICU and theatres is running inside instruments, it might be windows underneath (although is more likely to be VXWorks etc) has an interface that is different on every model and every maker.

Most of the clerical apps are either in-browser or running a terminal emulator talking to some mainframe curses type app. The only issues with these are the ones that are IE6 only which are going to need changing for Windows7 anyway.

The only people who need windows are managers doing Powerpoint . As a general principle anyone in any organisation that needs Powerpoint should be fired - their job is obviously not vital.

As for the retraining - the BBC just redesigned it's web site. Do all the millions of visitors from around the world suddenly need retraining to use it? Do you need retraining to click on the little red circle to close the browser on Ubuntu rather than red cross to close it on windows

Digital ad portrayed Catholic Queen as 'flesh-eating zombie'

@Confusing

> returned to authentic forms of Christian worship.

And since that is Judaism without the eye watering penis+knife thing, plus bacon butties - why not go back to the original ?

@Bizarre religious slant

> It reflects well on modern Britain, where we've thankfully left that sort of mumbo-jumbo behind.

Yep, can't imagine the depiction of any other religous figure, some prophet say, where this would have even made the local paper.

Sluggish corporates ill-prepared for death of Win XP SP2 support

@fixed for ya

So you think the switch from XP to Win7 is equivalent to the switch from VT100 -> PC ?

Perhaps sir should take a little water with sir's head cleaner?

@Seems amazing

it seems amazing that any company would spend 200quid/machine upgrading to Vista and then another 200quid upgrading to Windows7, buying new apps and peripherals to replace ones with that worked on Windows XP. Replacing older PCs that can't upgrade, retraining staff etc.

All so that they can fill in their expenses spreadsheet with an Aero theme?

From a business case - exactly what can the majority of your users do on Win7 that they couldn't do on W2K ?

Fring-Skype iPhone slanging match: Telcos v freetards

Erm isn't voice data?

> Skype's P2P network using a normal voice channel rather than data,

>relieving pressure on data services.

Wouldn't the cell phone company rather carry highly compressed Skype(tm) codec(tM) data(tm) rather than encode everything up themselves into GSM then unpack into POTS then recode it at the other end ?

I know cell companies make us pay as if data, sms and voice were entirely unrelated but they must realise that on their networks it's the same thing!

Ballmer: Windows Mobile lost a 'whole generation'

Microsoft's solution

They simply go to all the US makers of cell phones and tablets and force them to put Windows mobile on all of them otherwise they will cut-off their OEM deals.

It worked in the PC and server market - why wouldn't it work with cellphones ?

Ireland to block EU-Israel data hoover

@data protection

To be fair they were protecting the passport data, they made backup copies of it.

If Ireland had somehow lost the data for those passports Isreal could have sent them a copy.

Microsoft swings axe at 'hundreds' of jobs globally

64-68

Didn't Microsoft say 64 job levels would be enough for everybody?

Of course at HP you would have a simple 64bit job level, with each bit encoding for a specific responsibility. I always got the feeling that the original HP was created by Vulcans.

NSA setting up secret 'Perfect Citizen' spy system

@I'm less worried by the NSA

What about if you are a competitor to Raytheon?

And Raytheon have just installed a sealed black box on your corporate LAN?

What about if you are a foreign company in the US that might be competing with a US company?

What if that other company was vital to the US defence, or was vital to the re-election of a US senator, or just paid some programmer to get a copy of all your traffic ?

If you were Raytheon would you agree to the French government installing monitoring gear on your LAN? Why is it any different if the US government are installing monitoring gear at Airbus?