Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

Japanese police cuff Hentai smut scam suspects

@It sounds like

On the other hand, think how valuable the personal details of somebody that stupid would be to a marketing company!

BT quotes pensioner £150,000 to get broadband

It does cost that much

Get planning permission, get right of way leaves across everybodies land, get permission from highways agency (major roads) local council (minor roads) every local farmer (unaproved roads).

Then rent some plant and a crew to dig a ditch, closing roads, rerouting drains, gas lines etc.

Then lay some conduit, then the cables, then the network equipement.

Put aside a few 10K for when you have to dig it all up again in a year when some idiot digs through it with a JCB.

We had to pay something like this to run a fibre across our site because BT wouldn't let us put it in their existing ducts - on our property!

Anybody remember the name of the company in Cambridge that were doing individual microwave phone links from a mini-dish on your house? Had a big building opposite the science park - then went bust because BT were promising to connect anyone for 100quid.

Contractors dodge ID cards axe

@Sir

Because the 1Bn savings are only the stated costs of the contracts.

When they overrun by a factor of 10x like all government IT contracts and eventually have to be abandoned and then redone at twice the original cost - which then overruns by a factor of 10 and so on....

£15 a month for legal P2P?

Labels love it

The reason labels like this is because a flat fee means they don't have to actually pay any money to the artists.

If you download a track by band X then band X get a cut.

But a general download tax means all the money goes to the RIAA/PRS who take a cut and pass some on to the labels that are in their club (so non to small labels).

The labels then pass on some to their current favorite artists by some formula they get to decide - so it becomes a way of underwriting the launch of their latest boy band.

It also gives labels a continuing reason to exist in an age when a band can do a deal with itunes directly.

In Canada there is a tax on blank CDs to pay for illegal downloads (go figure) but the money goes to the equivalent of the RIAA who spend most of it on fees. - the rest they give to Celine Dion.

Meanwhile an indie artist that sells their own CDs have to pay a 25c levy on each disc.

Beeb, British Museum face smut issues over saucy pot

@Great lawmaking there

Even better, you can get married at 16 - but take a picture of your wife giving birth at 17 and you are a peodo.

Just ignore it

There is a similar vase in the Fitzwilliam that is captioned "man and boy dancing" - oh no they aren't!

Of course you could simply arrest anyone who suggests that anything rude is going on - since imagining an act is probably against the law.

Murdoch's paywall: The end of the suicide era?

Daily fail paywall

So after years of telling their readers that going online will expose them to identity thieving pornographers and using your credit card online will fund underage terrorists to hang around on street corners - the fail is going to ask you to pay to read it online?

Terence Conran slams 'appalling' Olympic mascots

Could be worse

Firstly they are better than the bulldog in a union-jack T shirt or whatever the Daily Fail wants.

Then they are much less embarrassing than the ones for Vancouver.

They took elements from a few different native gods/spirits and youth-alised them, then got the chiefs of the local indian bands to welcome them to the opening ceremony.

So roughly like saying - we based the mascot on Jesus but added wings, a jet pack and he transforms into Mohamed, then got the chief Rabbi to introduce him.

Atlantis spacewalkers snapped through shuttle windows

OMG the shuttle is fake

An American vehicle with no cupholders?

ps. Nobody pays for those lab timers, you get them for free by being nice to the Pfizer/Sigma-Aldritch/Agilent rep.

I Married a Monster from ISO 9000

We don't make software

At the last place management didn't tell the auditors we actually wrote software.

The ISO9000 people came in, made sure we had written procedures for orders, made sure the orders matched the invoices and delivery notes and gave us the little gold star.

Nobody questioned how we got the stuff we were shipping!

Wallace & Gromit rouse Atlantis crew

Duct tape

Famously so, yes -

http://www.universetoday.com/2008/04/21/the-best-engineering-tool-in-space-duct-tape/

Oz customs search lappies and mobes for smut

The new S Africa

>i never thought Australia'd be the first (democratic country) to go this completely batshit

With S. Africa now a fun and friendly beacon of love, peace and harmony plus America with a black president. I think they saw a vacancy to be the new pariah nation.

What's pornography

To quote the great Bill Hicks:

The Supreme court says Pornography is anything without artisitic merit that causes sexual thoughts. - so that's pretty much all of advertising then.

Google programming Frankenstein is a Go

@Dynamic typing fail

Sure - because if it compiles it's correct

Atlantis spacewalkers complete ISS battery swap

Difficulty

Apparently the little red ribbon was folded inside and so they had to lever the first battery out with a bic pen cap - tricky with a space suit

Jodrell Bank gets swanky visitor centre, infuriating maze

Cafe and Maze

Funding for science - nope, funding for post-docs and researchers - nope, funding for new telescopes - nope.

Cafe, maze and gift shop - sure, good to know that heritage is Britain's future.

Sergey Brin: 'We screwed up' on Street View Wi-Fi grab

@Um....one question no one has asked or answered that I've seen...

Because their engineered solution was something like "wireshark - dumpall > data.dat" and worry later about extracting SSID == starbucks or whatever they wanted.

El reg's webserver collects a lot of data about my browser - why does the reg need to know what version of Java I have installed or what service pack of XP? It must be part of an evil el Reg plan to take over my machine in order to advance skynet and the coming apocalypse.

Or it might be that thats the default in apache and nobody has time to change it.

@Why/What

They wanted to record open WiFi locations, reasonable - if you are mapping the area anyway then some statisitcs on amount of free public wifi might be useful. It's going to get out of date but it's only costing you a wifi card on the laptop.

The software is cobbled together from a bunch of freeware network monitors, one of them was also dumping fragments of captured packets.

When the cars get back everything gets dumped to a server, Tb of images, Mb of raw GPS data for latter correction and a few Mb of captured packets.

I'm inclined to believe Google on this one - if they really wanted to capture lots of information about you they have better ways than grabbing a fraction of a second of open wifi.

2012 Olympic mascots cop a shoeing

Dissapointed

I assumed it would be a Bobby truncheoning Mohamed.

Dev goes 'Wild' with H.264 Firefox

@Patent free world

Creating a Patent free codec isn't that simple.

You can look at the patents held by H.264 and avoid those, but you can't know if somebody has a patent on the concept of compressing video, or even the idea of showing video on a computer.

Remember the one recently where somebody had patented storing values in a bitfield!

Solid state drives set for huge growth

@Huge growth immediately available

Without a change in the technology the cell size for flash memory is still quite large.

Replacing 2TB of rust with todays chips would fill a desktop PC, then you've still got packaging and cooling issues.

FOSS vendors lick chops over ConLib IT plans

@Foss Systems

>Royal Navy(RN) to base it's next generation fire control system on Windows 2000

Admiral heard it came with free Minesweeper?

Openoffice efficency

The greatest saving with OO is that it doesn't read Powerpoint very well.

Banning Powerpoint saves any organisation $ 1.7 Bn (*)

* - note number entirely made up in the spirit of all Powerpoint presentations

Nato should tool up for cyber war, say globo-bigwigs

Some training changes then

On my command you will insert cross-site script......

wait for it ......

wait for it ......

INSERT

YOU orrible little hacker you, you call that an SQL injection ....

Samsung NX10

micro 4/3 ?

Not sure I see the link with micro4/3 , that standard is supposed to let you have compact cameras with interchangeable high quality lenses - like the original Leica rangerfinders.

This is just another EVIL with it's own propriety lens mount for the same price as an entry level Canon/Nikon/Olympus DSLR

Neil Armstrong renews attack on Obama space vision

@Blank check

Not a fan of Nasa, and I think commercial will do LEO launches cheaper.

But this isn't really a question of writing Nasa anoraks a blank check, it's simply the difference between writing a blank check to Boeing/Lockheed/Rockwell space systems division rather than Boeing/Lockheed/Rockwell defense systems division.

The same money is going to subsidize the same corporations to build pretty much the same kit - it's just the nature of the package to be delivered that's different.

Welsh police come down hard on Octopussy porn

@Pedants' corner

>The correct plural is octopodes.

The sun thinks that means having sex with 8 children.

@He also faces 14 charges

That's exactly the reason this is important.

It's a common police/judicial practice - get a guy who is plainly guilty of lots of stuff that any jury will convict on. Throw in an extra charge something like possessing a mobile phone in a section44 area, or using encryption to hide the images.

Got a conviction and you have precedence that using encryption can be prosecuted.

So the next English nationalist in Wales can be held for having an encrypted disk.

Foreign IT pros in USA get paid more than Americans - study

@bad logic

True - same argument for unionizing/registered profession.

If there were only 1000 new programmers a year allowed to qualify in the US then salaries would rise above doctor's. Alternatively companies would just move their work overseas.

The dev team for our US/UK company is in Vancouver - because it's easier for both Brits and Americans to work in Canada, than it is for Brits->US or Americans->UK.

ConLibs to outlaw kiddyprinting without permission

@They're not storing fingerprints

Because the company takes a full fingerprint to generate the hash.

A college here wanted to introduce it for the library, the system was built and run by a US company. Although their pitch was full of stuff about the entry system only storing a hash - they couldn't guarantee that the raw fingerprint data wouldn't be handed over to the US authorities under patriot-ish rules.

US Navy's plane-hurling mass driver in tech hiccup

Another British invention

The elastic band - cheap, affordable and able to launch a new generation of lighweight unmanned aircraft across a classroom

Trident, nuke energy looking poorly under LibCons

Upto to date then

Libdems think having 4 nuke subs at sea is an expensive outdated relic of the cold war - useless in todays asymetric wars on terror.

The army agree and want to replace it with a fleet of tanks to fight the soviets in Germany.

The air force agree and want to replace it with an air superiority fighter to fight the soviet airforce

The navy want to replace it with a carrier fleet to fight the Japanese at Pearl Harbour or possibly the French at Trafalgar.

Osborne to 'get Britain working' - except for ID contractors

@no more Mandy

Unless they put a stake through his heart - he's going to turn up in the tory cabinet in the next few years!

City Police still using Terror Act to bother photographers

2012

Personally I worry about the huge pressure on the police arresting 100,000 visitors to the olympics - trying to get the message out here that if anyone wants to risk visiting London (crawling as it is with terrorist photographers) they should make sure they don't take a camera or a cellphone with a camera.

Doctors aim to have Chief Medical Officer struck off

Ironic really

"We are drawing a line in the sand over cronyism and lack of accountability in the upper echelons of the medical profession."

Which is exactly what the Web site was supposed to do - it allowed all junior doctors to see and apply for all posts.

Instead of the existing system of the plum jobs being fixed up on the golf course for a "young chap from my old college".

Google shelves 3D interwebs plug-in for Mozilla play

No plugin = run everywhere

And by not needing plugins you don't have to worry about supporting lots of different mobile OSes and ARM powered tablets.

And it's not as easy for certain companies to lock you out of their platform - unless they also want to ban Javascript.

Met issues internet cafe terror warnings

ICANN allowing unicode domains

It's got easier today though. ICANN just allowed unicode domains, so you can tell if something is a suspicious terrorist (ie foreign) website - it's written in swiggly writing.

Mobe-wielding drivers getting away with it

@Not comparing apples with apples

So if I had a racing license I could speed - since I am more competent than an average driver?

How long is the training course to use a radio while driving? Couldn't the mobile operators offer such a course to give their customers the same skills?

Nokia puts out platform-slutty Qt SDK beta

Qt on android

Opensource sdk on opensource OS ? No problem - http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/4167

Google victorious in US trademark & German copyright cases

@irrelevant

Google does not charge to be higher on the search list.

There are a number of underhand tricks that 'dealtime' type sites use to get higher up the list - and google actively fights them. It's not in googles interest to have scams at the top of their search list.

This argument was about eg. searching for BMW and allowing Mercedes to pay to be a sidebar ad.

Met terror squad beats all complaints

Simple arithmetic

They are an anti-terrorist squad.

If you are anti them, then you are anti anti-terrorism = a terrorist.

Kent police bring obscenity charge over online chat

@you missed

You want to get a precedence set in court that this online chat is illegal - and you have the power to regulate it, - you don't start with an online message criticizing the police and try and get that banned.

You pick someone that the press/public/jury is going to have no sympathy for (child porn) add this charge onto the end of an automatic conviction and bingo you have a new crime.

'Gossips' say Apple will acquire ARM

Ain't going to happen

No you cannot patent/copyright/have 'first dibs no-returns' on instruction sets.

I can program up an FPGA today so that the same opcode is load register as it is on an ARM9.

ARM have a vast number of patents on how to implement the CPU efficiently but there is nothing stopping me making a binary compatible version (same as VIA etc do for x86).

There is also nothing stopping me making a pin compatible part, Intel resorted to patenting the locking mechanism for it's sockets to get round this.

In fact one of the original design goals for ARM was that it would emulate other chips - my ARM dev kit in 1988 came with an 8086 emulator (that ran at 4.77MHz), it could also execute 6502 code. Andy Hopper was a big fan of the Transmeta concept 10years before Transmeta.

Next the licensees of ARM are not all stupid. Customers like Sony/Samsung/etc are not going to be held hostage by some guys in a barn in Cambridge. They will all have second source clauses where if ARM cannot supply the parts they are free to take the design in-house or to someone else. These second source requirements are why Intel actually owns the rights to one set of ARM cores.

Embedded processor design is a lot easier today than it was back then. There are dozens of equivalents of Ms. Wilson in basements all over the world that could give you a design. Remember as well that although ARM9 in smartphones is the big news, 100x as many lower power ARM cores are used in cars, MP3 players, lift controllers etc. Apple aren't interested in this market - but manufacturers would be scrambling for a replacement part.

Finally the regulatory authorities in Europe are not going to allow it. Especially when the various other (european) phone makers are involved and can give a little nudge to the idea that locking iPhone to one service provider might also be worth looking at.

>ARM up 180%

Yes but the cost of the GBP you need you buy those shares is down 180% - that makes ARM (along with any other UK listed company) a bit of a bargain at the moment.

Would that be legal

>And all the IP that's tied up in Arm would make it bloody difficult to find an alternative

You can't copyright instruction sets, theres nothing to stop somebody else making a byte compatible ARM core. It's just at the current 5-25c licence cost it's not worth it.

There are a bunch of opensource CPU core designs, at least for the low end ARM that could be used in a lot of devices, it wouldn't cost Nokia/Sony/Samsun very much together to make an ARM9 replacement if their lives depended on it

C language inventor spurns Google's language exam

Big company policies

I've had that at big corp (especially banks)

Favorite is the logic/spacial reasoning test (which of this shapes is different from the other shapes type questions?) to see if you have an 'aptitude' for programming.

I would have thought my PhD showed an aptitude - true it doesn't prove i know the specific language you are using or that I can program my way out of a paperbag but it probably does show an interest/aptitude for programming more than your "rearranging symbols for 5 year olds" test.

Nokia: digital SLRs are doomed

@well

>It's like saying that the motorbike will replace cars

No cos motorbikes are better than cars !

It's like saying segways will replace cars cos they have smaller wheels!

Microsoft stealth launches 'historic' programming language

@jlocke

That's why i said it wouldn't be used for NBody simulations - even C# isn't going to replace Fortran or C++ for this.

I was responding to the why "function programming" question - it lets you write complex rules simply. In fact LISP is used in radar system, you don't use it for the solution to the phase unwrapping in multi beam or phased-array - but you do use it for the "business rules" in modern tracking systems.

eg. If targets flight plan looks like a commercial airliner, and we are near a commercial airline route and it hasn't made any turns with the dynamics of a fighter then it's probably an Iranian Airbus not an F15 so don't shoot it down - all these are much easier to code (and change) in a functional language than in C/assembler.

@Functional Programming

CPU is cheap, coders are expensive - especially in the complex data/maths field.

Writing an mpeg decoder to be embedded in a DVD player is probably not going to use F#, neither is an N-body simulation of a galaxy collision.

As the business logic layer as a way of coding the rules for which financial instruments we can sell to US resident from an offshore trust in the last quarter of a tax year - then this is a better solution than C++ or SQL.

Obama 'deep space' Mars plans in Boeing booster bitchslap

Daily Mail law

It's a useful response .

If Boeing oppose the plan it's probably a good deal for the taxpayer.

It's like just knowing you should be in favor of anything that the Daily mail hates.

Ellison's database customers slip slidin' to x86

@Please set me straight

Hardware savings from buying one server instead of 3 lightly-loaded servers for different databases.

All the extra savings for network infrastructure, rack space, HVAC

License savings if you discover that your 3virtual DBs on one CPU only count as one install.

But the article reads like somebody took a Gartner report and cut it down to fit on a page - I think that's called tech journalism these days.