Posts by John 156

Auntie remains MYSTIFIED by that weekend BBC iPlayer and website outage

Outsourcing to India looks like the cause.

HP's Machine and IBM's $3bn R&D splash – aka how to survive Google

Oh really?

"Worse, neither Amazon or Google or even Microsoft appear to do much fundamental hardware and materials science research, so for IBM or HP to stumble would likely set the wider technology industry back by decades."

Amazon, Google and Microsoft are more users of hardware than originators. HP and IBM had major business segments using Intel technology to build servers; that's not origination, either. So we are all reliant on HP and IBM to belately get back to doing what they were originally founded to do many years ago. Meanwhile, there are plenty of newer hardware companies, far more innovative than IBM or HP are now; but they have step aside and let HP and IBM do the heavy lifting because they have armies of R & D engineers sitting there with sharpened pencils waiting to be given something to do.

Actually, I have a suggestion for HP: why not invent a printer which is not continuously running out of ink and does not suffer from progenia.

There's NOTHING on TV in Europe – American video DOMINATES

a drift to US moral codes and values?

Possibly, de facto, but what it means in practice is Hollywood's moral codes and values or more accurately, the moral codes and values and historical perspectives which Hollywood, with its atypical demographic, wishes to foist on the rest of the world. Should we be concerned? Yes. "he who controls the past controls the future, and he who controls the present controls the past". - George Orwell. Personally, I prefer foreign language programmes and films because they usually do not attempt to emulate Hollywood clutural norms or be made with an eye to the US market.

EU's top data cops to meet Google, Microsoft et al over 'right to be forgotten'

What is news? what is legitimate news; what is illegitimate news?

Lord Northcliffe: "News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress; all the rest is advertising"

Lord Northcliffe was declared insane on the say so of a purported doctor in Switzerland and died shortly afterwards. The is a battle on the web between those who want the truth out and those trying to suppress and distort it; these latter who have rendered Wikipeda totally unreliable except for techie stuff now have another weapon in their armoury.

What's inside AMD's life-support machine? A big pile o' PlayStation 4s and XBox Ones

Re: I'm buying. They aren't selling

The numbers are telling AMD to stop competing with Intel on x86 head on. The new AMD roadmap shows 2015 to be when they offer users the plug compatible x86/ARM 'Project Skybridge' solution and if that is successful for the ARM variant, 2016 will see a switch to ARM only as the roadmap has a name for that ARM-based solution, the AMD designed 'K12' but not for the (fallback) prospective x86 solution. As AMD have stated, an ARM based chip is cheaper to develop and quicker to market which sounds like a strategy for catchup.

British cops cuff 660 suspected paedophiles

First things first

When are high profile practising paedophiles going to be arrested or do we have to wait for their demise in all cases to find out how shocking their crimes were? I have a very strong suspicion that people view material in all categories in which they would never themselves partake; however there are those who pose as fine upstanding members of the Community whose unpleasant proclivities in respect of children in care need to see the light of day.

BitTorrent not to blame for movie revenues, says economist

Does Hollywood produce entertainment, anymore?

Hollywood has moved from providing entertainment, other than for infants, to using its English language film monopoly for the purpose of Cultural Marxist grooming of its audience in order to prepare the world for Western multiculturalism; one of its great successes has been election of Barak Obama as President of the World whose interventions in Ukraine and the Middle East look designed to provoke a world war. In order to remind people what they would wish for if they rejected their multi-culti trash is increasingly repetitive films of the evil nazi genre; funnily they don't produce films about the Bolshevik Empire and the consequent dangers of allowing a criminal alien gang funded by Wall Street banksters to take over a country who would then go on to murder sixty million Slavic Christians with the ultimate goal of taking over the globe.

Intel told to PUT A SOC IN IT: Fill our kit with chips, says Panasonic

Re: Can't beat them, join them

"Except of course that Intel will struggle to make money [switching to ARM]. Their whole corporate culture is geared to high margin products (x86s that sell for $hundreds)."

That is why Intel will flog x86 to death whilst getting third parties to subsidise their fabrication facilities.

Royal Navy parks 470 double-decker buses on Queen Elizabeth

Re: White Elephant Ahoy!

From my experience, with a duff project the choices are either to spend the money and get it work or stop work and write off the committed contract cost; there aren't any other alternatives.

More than one way to spice the mainbrace

An inevitable consequence of playing the sailor's hornpipe. An alternative solution would be a boarding party and a jolly roger.

White Elephant Ahoy!

470 London buses is a nice little talking point to hide the fact that our only aircraft capable of using the flight deck are helicopters. The only fighter plane capable of using this vessel in the future is the MD Lightning II F35B STOVL which will be about $ouch! each and will have the aerodynamics of a brick should its sole forward engine fail, whilst its weapons carrying bay is full of vertical takeoff engine, to boot.

So we have an aircraft carrier at 290ft the longest we have ever had, dependent on the avilability of one possible aircraft because the aircraft carrier does not have a nuclear powered engine and does not have, therefore a steam catapult to launch many different types of aircraft; this has to be the worst weapons procurement programme in British history for which we have to thank the cretins in the Labour Party and Conservative Party who could not order pizzas for a party without screwing up.

'I got a little bit upset by that Register article...' says millionaire model. Bless!

What is this article about?

Obviously we should all be very concerned about the £200k of taxpayers' money received by Ms Cole's website, but that is hardly a huge sum compared with the billions wasted by the government on our behalf on ill-considerd, ill-executed schemes for streaming-lining government and buying votes; in fact its probably about the same amount as thieved by the average bankster on a quiet day before lunch.

As to Snowden, people should have no concern about the spying of CGHQ and NSA because the ultimate beneficiary for all their endeavours is the most benign nation on the planet composed of the most morally advanced human beings, in fact according to religious doctrine, the only human being on the planet, namely Israel.

Internet of Things fridges? Pfft. So how does my milk carton know when it's empty?

What really is the point of this article? Quite clearly the idea that fridges would become smart is based on the fact that people like David Cameron imagine that the Internet of Things refers to the white stuff in the John Lewis basement, they having imagined presumably that apart from computers and fridges, everything else works by magic.

Re: The internet of fridges

""if the door is shut, the little light is out,"

But is it?"

Yes it is, by inference, as you will find a lever at the top of the fridge which can be operated manually instead of by the door to switch off the light.

Supermodel Lily Cole: 'I got a little bit upset by that Register article'

My advice to Lily Cole would be: do not sunbathe and keep yourself covered in strong sunlight. ..and another thing: earning lots of money parading your long elegant frame in public does not necessarily indicate that you have what it takes to become a successful entrepreneur.

UK govt preps World War 2 energy rationing to keep the lights on

Re: Our MPs

I think you'll find that a PPE degree is ideal training for becoming a minister in a modern, vibrant, multicultural cretinocracy in which the pursuit of self-enrichment through graft whilst driving the country towards third world status is the name of the game and has been for decades.

UK govt 'tearing up road laws' for Google's self-driving cars: The truth

Re: Driverless car

"Do you have any evidence to support this?"

The Docklands Light Railway?

Re: I'm against it at this time. here's why...

What is needed for driverless cars is something akin to the Turing Test (except that it would not apply to the skill level of someone too young to drive) such as going round Hyde Park Corner in the rush hour from any direction and taking any exit without hitting another vehicle or forcing it into taking avoiding action.

Women found just TWO out of every HUNDRED US tech startups

Why not look at the GEDI website before deciding whether to take this seriously?

http://globalgie.com/

BT and Neul ink gov-funded deal: Milton Keynes to be test bed for Internet of Stuff

"BT's corporate IT practice boss Alan Ward said that a variety of applications could be cooked up using the infrastructure."

Always best to find the solution before defining the problem.

Urinating teen polluted 57 Olympic-sized swimming pools - cops

The correct action was taken in this case; what I would like to know is why the authorires have still taken no action to remove water molecules excreted by Napoleon? Is there not some danger I might catch megalomania?

Sorry London, Europe's top tech city is Munich

Three cheers for the EU

...and the point of this exercise is? Incidentally, why was there no recognition of Athens, Madrid and Brussels where Twitter was extensively use to co-ordidate Austerity Riots against the parasitical orgamisation that produced this garbage.

HP: Lenovo's buy of IBM x86 biz is bad, bad, bad...

HP - What's it for?

Despite the fact that I'm grateful to HP for overpaying for my Autonomy shares, I will still not forgive them for selling me an inkjet printer in which the total capacity of all five reservoirs is less than that of the monochrome HP printer which it replaced, such that it is for ever running out of ink. You can only expect to get away with a stunt like that once.

HP should either find some something useful to do or sell out to the highest bidder; its glory days are long over.

How Brit computer maker beat IBM's S/360 - and Soviet spies

Re: Plus ça change...

...then of course there was the brilliant GEC which was allowed to take over most of our electrical engineering industry, in order to remove its competitors, to great applause from City slickers, then refuse to perform R&D unless the taxpayer forked out. After we joined the 'Common Market', to avoid competition yet again, it put all its subsidiaries, apart from GEC Marconi into consortia, mostly German which now own the whole shebang, leaving GEC Marconi to be absorbed into BAe. Then there was the British Leyland Motor Corporation eventually sold to the Chinese fro £50m. That's what happens when engineering businesses are at the mercy of inept polititians (tautology) and spiv accountants (tautology).

Newsnight goes sour on Tech City miracle

Silicon Roundabout was alive and well in the age of the minicomputer; the magic of Silicon Roundabout was the same then as now: a refuge from the eye-watering rents of West End fleshpots and the City's iconic buildings.

As to Cameron's brilliant idea that we could go into business with Germany with the Germans doing the proper engineering bit and we doing the comms with the internet, does he really imagine that that would involve a fifty-fifty split of added value, or even that the Germans are not perfectly capable of doing their own internet thingy if they seriously think an intelligent fridge was a marketable commodity?

One has to suppose that for Cameron, the fact that Rolls-Royce monitors the vital organs of their turbo-props in operation and transmits the data back to Derby via satellite is hopelessly low-tech compared with an intelligent toaster or fridge for a twerp like Dave.

Microsoft issues less-than-helpful tips to XP holdouts

Re: How much of a challenge is re-installing XP?

It rather depends on which version of XP you have: I have an SP1 upgrade, so first of all I had to reinstall Windows 98SE... I found that Microsoft auto-updates did not interweave correctly with the Service Packs 2,3. so continuous intervention to attenuate this process was necessary. That was just getting XP reinstalled and up to date; then there were the non-Microsoft applications which had to be reinstalled, sometimes from diskette, and obtaining the patches for those, where my version was past its E-o-L, where the original supplier had been taken over, or even gone out of business etc.

About one week's work to get to approximately where I would have been had my recovery from backup not failed for some reason. Never again. After that episode I switched to Debian which does not harrass me every time I change my configuration either, since the concept of theft does not apply to free software.

HP 'KNEW' about Autonomy's hardware sales BEFORE the whistle blew: report

Re: Prepare for a huge class action

Would that inlude Leo Apotheker, the disastrous CEO before Meg Whitman whose decision to purchase Autonomy at a significant premium to market value, but without real due diligence, was in part, following other disastrous decisions by him, the cause of the 40% loss of market value under his tenure, following the prior decision of SAP not to extend his contract as CEO having reviewed his performance in that role.

UK claims 'significant lead' in drones after Taranis test flight

Who will be the second customer after Jeff Bezos?

Report: IBM to peddle its chip wing

Obviously IBM do not read the British Press and so have not heard about the value for money achieved for the British taxpayer by taking 'advice' from GS and UBS when Royal Mail was sold for 40% less than market value, despite the fact that many banks who failed to be awarded the contract quoted perfectly realistic valuations. I myself tried to obtain some shares, but failed. It is not every day that a sound business offering a 7% yield at the offer price comes to market.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/08418300-8f46-11e3-be85-00144feab7de.html?siteedition=uk#axzz2sdU1PajA

fWHoaR! Researcher crack eternal mystery of what women want in a man

More pointless research from a Psychology department; keep on useless eating, chaps, humanity could do entirely without your pseudo-scientific discoveries..

Why IBM's server sell-off is a lightbulb moment

By selling its system x channel to Lenova, immediately, IBM has created greater pricing flexibility for the rest of its server range. If IBM believes the x86 architecture has peaked, certainly other than as a commodity, it conflicts with IBM's known specialisation in high priced quality. Does IBM have future plans in the hardware sector; neither does the author of this post nor do we know.

Cameron: UK public is fine with domestic spying

Why do we always finish up with a f**kwit as PM? Dave, of course, suggested in parliament that the Somerset floods were caused by Global Warming; the actual reason was the decision of the Environment Agency to stop dredging rivers and pumping flood water in order to return the Somerset Levels to the aquatic wasteland it was before being drained several centuries ago without asking the permission of the farmers or householders whose lives would be devastated. l

A BBC-by-subscription 'would be richer', MPs told

Re: Adverts

Parents should be aware that the BBC childrens' output is mainly concerned with the Cultural Marxist grooming of their children; they may not pester to be poisoned by unwholesome food substitutes, but their tiny minds are being poisoned by toxic propaganda which is in many ways far worse.

Boffins: Antarctic glacier in irreversible decline, will raise sea levels by 1cm

Re: Appeal to authority

Ignorant twaddle. The Pensions Administration system which I corrected for y2k would have had over 80 serious errors with the ability to cause serious financial data corrpution and system failures, quite apart from unknown others from feed-in systems, nor would they have all shown up on 1.1. 2000 - more ignorant twaddle. Obviously you have never had experience of complex financial systems.

Gay hero super-boffin Turing 'may have been murdered by MI5'

The assumption was that Turing laced an apple with cyanide and ate it. Fact 1. No Suicide note was allegedly found at the scene. Fact 2. Turing regularly ate an apple without finishing it. Fact 3. the apple was not tested. There is therefore no evidence that he committed suicide. Turing's death was not properly investigated and the verdict of the Inquest was reached without any supporting evidence whatsoever.

Now, let me try to lock myself in my red sports bag for the umpteeth time - I know it's possible.

British Second World War codebreaker Alan Turing receives Royal pardon

Re: Pardon

Although Alan Turing was clearly entitled to a posthumous Royal parden, was he first in the queue? I humbly submit that Charles I was the innocent victim of the traitor Oliver Cromwell known to have been funded by banksters in Amsterdam who were then allowed to enter our realm as a reward to engage in usurious banksterism. What about Joan of Arc? A witch? Come on. We need a new quango (the National Organisation for the Rewriting of History to make Everything Better) to draw up a comprehensive list of important historical figures who met a sticky end at the hands of the English authorities and therefore should receive a Royal pardon.

Industry group blames 'outdated' kit for stock-market tech disasters

Re: Better Idea

No. Make HFT (high frequency trading) illegal. Make front running and flash trading illegal. A stock exchange should be where buyers and sellers meet, not where disgusting parasitical spivs can harvest the wealth of legitimate market users.

Apple bests Dell for first time as preferred US consumer PC choice

Re: Apple is now the preferred choice of US consumers shopping for desktop PCs

I think we are trying to oversimplify tthings here. Personal Computer was the designation of IBM's first microcomputer with an Intel instruction set (8088) and supporting motherboard. There have been many generations with backwards compatibility since then to all of which would apply the term 'PC', but otherwise it's not a PC, even if it looks like one.

World's OLDEST human DNA found in leg bone – but that's not the only boning going on...

Re: Interesting, but changes little

"It seems to me that Darwin's contemporaries, without the aid of genetics, understood evolution better than most people today."

The people who misunderstand it today are those whose forebears were too busy polishing the silver in the butler's pantry to misunderstand what Darwin's theory proposed.

RBS MELTDOWN LATEST: 'We'll be the bank we should be ... next YEAR maybe'

"It is too early to speculate on the cause. Our priority and focus has been to fix the problem."

I tend to find that understanding the cause of a problem helps identify the extent of the data corruption and the course of action required to fix it; it further helps to identify who should be fired because at the moment whoever it is will be busy trying to cover their tracks and muddy the waters.

Gates chokes up, WEEPS to Microsoft shareholders amid talk of CEO hunt

Now, now don't you ever forget how you used to queue all night to be first to purchase your new very much improved 16-bit Windows O/S system for your 32-bit computer, and it was so cheap too, worth every penny. You were so lucky.

True fact: Britain is losing its brains

The UK has the highest proportion of invention taking place in Universities as opposed to in Corporates. Cambridge University has a wacking 30% foreign inventors. Conclusions a) UK is poorly endowed with scientifically based corporates because of the destruction of the mechanical engineering industry by Trade Union bosses by striking it into oblivion and the destruction of the electrical engineering industry by Lord Weistock of GEC by taking over most of it and never investing in R & D unless paid for by Ministry of Defence and then merging most of it with mainly German businesses and b) scientific education at the secondary level is crap as a result of dumbing down of exams and the educational focus on cretins rather than academically gifted students and c) the City attracts the scientifically able to make money for the banksters instead of creating real added value through patentable invention. Upshot: main inventive corporates are big pharma which were left alone by Trade Union bosses and Lord Weinstock and the City is responsible for significant brain drain toward socially useless activity. Educational outlook poor unless selective education is available at taxpayer funded schools so universities will continue to attract a disproportionately large proportion of properly educated foreigners.

RM CEO: We didn't even try to sell PC biz before killing it

Re: Good News

Whereas I might agree with your sentiments, I believe that the idea that RM is now out of the education market is premature, as a cursory glance at their website would endorse.

In my estimation any company that specialises in supplying the public sector is just as likely to be about ripping off the taxpayer with very poor value deals, as he is a far softer target than hard-headed businessmen. A sensible school would seek out a supplier which operates competitively in the world of grownups.

Coding: 'suitable for exceptionally dull weirdos'

Re: Comment from the Cockwomble in question

"This year, only 4,000 people out of 300,000 took computing at A-level - less than 2%."

So only 2% of the school population wasted their time on that particular non-academic subject. I would recommend that the best A levels for Computer science or any other branch of engineering or physics, is 2 maths and one physics. Michael Gove should ensure that schools are able to teach those properly and leave it at that.

IT bloke denies trying to shag sheep outside football ground

I don't think this is a suitable topic for the Register. However, my dad told me that when he was a village kid in Yorkshire, a farmworker was brought before the magistrate for having carnal knowledge of a sow; he was fined £5. After that the village kids used to follow him around making grunting noises.

David Attenborough warns that humans have stopped evolving

I believe the next evolutionary step for humanity will be to become RoundUp Ready as all those whose metabolisms are compromised by harmless-to-humans weedkiller are eliminated from the gene pool; thus Roundup will become mostly harmless to humans and Monsanto will take over from Goldman Sachs as Masters of the Universe.

Intel's new top-dog desktop 'Extreme' CPU fails to excite geekerati

high impact (on wallet) x86 gets faster (slightly)

This device is aimed squarely at the market for those who like to be able to check that their processor is top dog on a performance comparitor chart assuming there are still such people, presumably the same people who used to queue all night to get their mits on the latest offering from Msoft. It's all so last year.

Boffin's claim: I have found how to get girls into tech

Is professor Sapna Cheryan of Washington uni's psychology department the victim of minority or female preference herself, or is psychology the sort of discipline that attracts those who are not very bright?

A better approach would be to tell putative female candidates that they can all become managers and spend their time in meetings and bedeck their desks with stuffed animals.

Throwing arms let humans rise above poo-flinging apes to play cricket

I tend to find, being only a rather primitive primate, that when I try to throw something, I lose my balance and fall over; hence, I conclude my inability to throw is related to the fact that I have not yet fully evolved the technique of balancing securely on my two hind limbs.