Posts by Gartal

Huawei's many-headed beast of a cloud wants a serious bite of the action

Five clouds

We predict that there will be a need for more than five computers worldwide

.....

OK... Red wire or black... *Clickety* You've emailed the schematic? Yes, got it! It's opening. And... WHAT? NO!

Nothing more annoying.....

I think that having $6,500.00 worth of tools knocked off from my van last Sunday night was a tad more annoying. Similarly I found some years ago that breaking my leg in seven places and requiring skin, bone and muscle grafts, not to mention MRSA Septicaemia a triffle more annoying than a video having to buffer. Not to put too fine a point on it, my father dying earlier this year and my wife of 38 years buggering on last month overshadows internet connectivity issues fairly substantially..... I might go so far as to say that all of the above trump it.

Artificial intelligence will eradicate channel drudgery, says Lenovo boss

Jobs and growth, jobs and growth

Do we really need this?

Bean counters and apprentice billionaires are constantly saying that "We" don't want to have to do boring and or repetitive tasks. The We in this case being those not destined for billionairedom.

I started in the computer industry in 1991 when there was a computer store in every high street and every shopping mall. In a very short time they all dried up. Computer hardware got better, operating systems and software got better. We, the technicians asked for this, we cursed at having to wait around while DOS 5 took twenty minutes to FDISK, reboot and format a 500MB drive, or we had to set up WINS and DNS or took forever to create new users or had to reboot NT 3x just because we had changed a value of the network stack.

I have no doubt that AI will improve well beyond what it is now, just as it has over what it was in the 90's. The question though is whether "We" really want it to. Think of all of the people done out of reception jobs just because some smart arse came up with an automated phone answering system. The automated phone answering system moved the responsibility for understanding a problem from the receptionist to the person making the call. A good receptionist can elicit the reason for a call to a company with whom the customer rarely deals far better and far faster than the customer can make sense of the options available in the automated system. But the receptionist is one of the We, someone who apparently prefers to be unemployed than employed, even if in a repetitious job.

I don't think of myself as a Luddite and I do understand that I am short on imagination, just like all of the futurologists and engineers and apprentice billionaires because I can not see where all of the people whose jobs we are casting off are going to be employed. What are they going to do? We have just about completely eradicated jobs which illiterates can perform by requiring a basic standard of literacy for everything. Further, with OH&S, transparency and accountability, we have mandated that you have to go to school and obtain a license to wipe your arse or blow your nose so all of those people of low intelligence who are really quite well suited to many of the boring jobs like chipping weeds on the roadside for the council now have well caked arseholes and snot encrusted faces because they are not sufficiently brainy to get the relevant ticket. And they don't have a job because the other We have decided that it makes better commercial rather than better social and environmental sense to require the former weed chipper to get a quad bike license and a dangerous goods ticket and get out there and spray a nice line of dead brown grass on the edge of the nature strip (if he/she is smart enough to get said licenses).

Are we all going to end up making coffees or working in one of the shoe stores which will be the entire basis of the economy within fifty years time?

I get fed up with having to make my way through phone jungles, "press option 1 for cocks, option two for socks, option three for replacement O rings for rocket boosters, option four for poofters, option five to hear today's definition of what constitutes full employment, there is no option six, and no poofters" Is my life better for not having to speak to someone? Is the life of the person to whom I may once have spoken better for not having a phone to answer and no money in the kitty?

If everyone has their job taken over by a machine, where will the rest of the money come from so that those apprentice billionaires can become proper journeyman billionaires?

Oh Snap! How intelligent people make themselves stupid for Snapchat

Re: It's not rocket science

"which confuses quantity for quality" But quantity has a quality all of it's own.

Besides your comment makes you out to be an old fogey, if a picture is worth a thousand words and you don't want to discuss philosophy, theology, history or anything for which there are no pictures, why not send a picture?

Remember, you are the people your parents warned you against.

Want a Windows 10 update? Don't go to Microsoft ... please

Funny

When I suggested this at an MS function fifteen years ago, they laughed at me!

Ever wondered what the worst TV show in the world would be? Apple just commissioned it

Ahhh.... the 1950's

We had a prime minister who bemoaned that we had left the 1950's. Here is a return of at least one aspect of them.....

Microsoft unbuttons shirt, teases glimpse of Azure-in-a-box Stack

Full fat SBS returns......

AI pioneer Marvin Minsky dies at 88

Re: Nietzche

Human dead are a rare species. Almost all things which now are dead are not human.

Stephen Hawking reckons he's cracked the black hole paradox

Recant

If Galileo had just recanted, the Earth would have stayed at the centre of the Universe and Man would have not fallen into a Douglasian irrelevance. If Hawking was sensible as distinct from just a common of garden genius, he would have approached the Pope, recanted his 1970s position, been forgiven and blessed and the need for a tonsorial load of old cobblers would not have been necessary which would have left Prof. Hawking with the time needed to retire from disability.

Microsoft’s Revolution Analytics buy pays off, Linux-based R Server launched

the IoT era already generates (and will continue to do so) huge amounts of data which is otherwise useless

the IoT era already generates (and will continue to do so) huge amounts of data which is (>delete<otherwise) useless

We know this isn't about PRISM, Matt Warman MP. But do you?

He really doesn't Get it.....

Looking at what is provided from the transcript, I think that 1984 and Double Speak is live and well.

El Reg picked a pack of ace pic-titlers

Finally, I can buy Viagra on line!

Farewell to Borland C++: Embarcadero releases Delphi and C++ Builder 10

Re: Couldn't agree more - anything that costs more than a pint to a developer to try

"I never understood what killed that endeavor other than a Microsoft knee-capping." Part of the problem was that Phillip Khan thought it far more interesting to play jazz than to run Borland. Yes there was intense competition from Microsoft but Microsoft didn't tell Kahn to lose interest in his company

Suck it, Elon – Jeff Bezos' New Shepard space rocket blasts off, lands in one piece

Wankers, all(most) wankers

Jeez, what a bunch of cynical no hoping, useless, puissant fucking wanking cunts. Give the bloke some credit for fucksake. How about applauding eh? instead of sitting there typing, trying to out cool each other with nasty shit. You can all go and get fucked. The lot of you.

Bezos, Musk and Branson are doing the stuff. The real stuff. You're just a bunch of cunts.

There. Better now.

<Clap, clap, clap. Well done Mr. Bezos.>

World finally ready for USB-bootable OS/2

Re: Utter rubbish.

"Third, Microsoft played dirty, and for the non 'for Windows' (fullpack) versions of OS/2, IBM was paying MS a Windows license cost for each copy of OS/2 sold."

That wasn't MS playing dirty, it was IBM lawyers not doing their job properly. They also didn't do their job properly when they signed the contract for MS to supply them with DOS.

MS put in a clause which said that IBM had to pay MS a license fee for every processor sold. Not every processor sold which was capable of running DOS, but every processor that IBM sold. Mainframes, RISC machines, the while lot.

Re: What problem will it solve ?

Because LINUX, when I had a play with it in 1993 was at about version .8 and only just worked and was written by a lot of PFY's. LINUX was supplied by download through a 9800 BAUD modem to 10 1.44 MB diskettes. OS2 was supplied by a dirty great big company in a box with 27 (I think) diskettes.

MYSTERIES of remote ICE WORLD PLUTO: New pics BAMBOOZLE boffins

nor do we know how Pluto ended up in the shape we've found it in

It was like that when I got here

Ruskie ICS hacker drops nine holes in popular Siemens power plant kit

Correction

That should be "has reported a hatstand of nine vulnerabilities "

Facebook, Google execs cough to their biggest privacy blunders

Microsoft's biggest blunder?

Microsoft

Sex app Tinder in public meltdown – because a journo dared suggest it was, well, a sex app

Disappointing

The disappointing thing about this is that there is stull media mileage in the notion that having sex is in someway wrong and that looking for it is also morally dubious. For fuck's sake, we get here by sex. Reproduction is why we are here and sex is the means by which it is accomplished. Grow the fuck up Vanity Fair.

Drone racing sells robot soul to Mammon with launch of racing league

That is fucking awful

As stated

Symantec palms Veritas off on private equity group in $8bn mega-sale

Ownership

Hey! I haven't owned Backup Exec yet. When do I get my turn at fucking the guts out of it?

Boffins get the inside dope, craft white laser

Doncha lovit?

One of the real pleasures of reading Reg comments is finding stuff like this, where people with brains and an understanding of more than bacon get technical in their comments. Thank you ball boys.

(No sarcasm, genuinely pleased)

Happy birthday, Amiga: The 'other' home computer turns 30

Who gives a shit?

Who gives a shit? In the words of Alexi Sayle, "My big toenail has more intelligence"

Microsoft starts switching on paid Wi-Fi service with latest Windows 10 preview

Stay on topic please

Hi everyone, (and you Dave). I have been reading Reg comments for.......... about 40 years now and have to say some pretty harsh stuff.

Scotchbrite. Cheese grater. Smallpox. Hessian undies. Pox Vopuli. Tony Abbot.

Get the picture?

I cannae dae it, cap'n! Why I had to quit the madness of frontline IT

Re: I also agree, but...

"Perhaps more IT people should learn to speak 'management' more fluently" An issue with that is that whilst Managementese and ITese share many common words, they apply to different meanings and concepts. Where in IT we say something like ............ ahhh, who cares, Simon Travaglia and Scott Adams say it all anyway.

I think that the take home message for all of you stakeholders out there (management speak, like it?) is that when an Oracle like one of the afore mentioned give forth, we should listen and pay a dutiful observance and then get out the carpet, shovel and quick lime.

Norks execute underperforming terrapin farm manager

Just asking......

Notice the jowls, is KJoompalompa slowly evolving into Jabba the Hutt?

and as a PS, may we the poor and undeserving please have some new icons? there seems to be a paucity of relevance in the current crop. Perhaps the Director of Icons could be taken out and shot?

Australia gets its site filter at LAST

Another

Brainless

Bastard

On

Top

Microsoft to Linux users: Explain yourself

Re: Data, not information

That may be why they are asking......... duh.

Re: Well done Microsoft

"the Linux community" I keep seeing this phrase in various places and am somewhat mystified by it. If I look at the various distros and continued forks, I would have to say that far from being a Community, it is an anarcho-syndiclist commune where we each take it in turns to move away from wherever it is we are and set up shop with the People's Front Of Judea until the next schism when the Judean People's Front decides they are right.

Australia to develop STEM education plan any month now

Ha!

From the government that brought you reduced spending in education and got rid of the ministry for science and technology.

I bet that if it was discovered that Economists produced anything and that if there was a shortage of them, we would have no difficulty in getting them fast tracked into education.

Netflix fail proves copper NBN leaves Australia utterly 4Ked

And the point being missed here is that New Zealand is not blessed with

Another

Brainless

Bastard

On

Top

Re: Yes, without super high def entertainment there is nothing to do.

Yes, but you are deliberately missing part of the equation. Every time you change your mind about what you want, regardless of the 747 full of LTO's it entails another trip and the round time for that is poxy

Windows 10 build 10041: 99 bugs on the wall, fix a bug, add a feature, 114 bugs on the wall

Multiple desktops and windows 8

Firstly I am surprised that "some people didn't like windows 8" I thought it was universally accepted that Windows 8 was a piece of shit. https://lawrieaj.wordpress.com/2013/07/06/so-is-windows-8-1-as-shit-as-windows-8-00/

As to multiple desktops, I win ad a nauseam. Multiple desktops have been available on Windows since Windows 95/NT3.5 as far as I am aware. Russinovich from Sysinternals has had a version available forever. The main problem multiple desktops is that it not really as useful as it at first seems. I played with them under NT 4 when I had one of the first Matrox Millennium video cards. It was capable but the idea just didn't work too well.

Massive gravitational lens flare unveils EINSTEIN CROSS SUPERNOVA

"This is partly related to the fact that the universe decelerated before it accelerated" This implies that there was a second slightly smaller bang doesn't it? Sort of sloppy seconds for the Universe.

Australia threatens to pull buckets of astronomy funding

Dear World

Dear World

We here in Australia would like you to invest in an increasingly stupid society. We the government are doing everything we possibly can to hasten a medieval darkness in which knowledge and education are no longer available to anyone by the wealthy.

We have removed the last scintilla of imagination from Cabinet and have replaced it with cardboard. We found that we were not very good at thinking of policy for ourselves and so have subsumed the wish list of the Australian Chamber of Arseholes in Business and branded it A Way into the Future.

Although Maggie Thatcher, God rust her box is no longer alive, we pay homage to her Fuckwittist financial theories and seek to emulate them. To that end we have eradicated anything to do with research for which there is not a direct and immediate technological issue. So, CSIRO is now working out of a matchbox, the SKA should just shrivel up and die and we are trying to sell off education to the highest bidder.

Thank you for your time and here is a brief knock knock joke for you all

Knock knock

Who's there?

Garn

Garn who?

Garn get fucked.

This has been a Party Political message from the Liberal Antiparty of Australia. All names and places will have been sold or scrapped by the time you read this.

Ford to save you from BIKE FITNESS HORROR

One other thing....

I notice that you need a car to make your bike work. That is just fucked.

The thing that Ford forgot

Lots of nice comments here, some even vaguely related to the topic which is a novel proposition.

"The usage model Ford gives is: a company which has deliveries to make, can drive to an area, two people unpack goods from the van onto the bikes, and then cycle round making the deliveries, with the van moving to a rendezvous point where the bikes can catch up with it, be loaded and recharge before going on to the next distribution point"

If this was a viable or even useful model then it would be in use already with muscle powered bikes. Like the Segway (Segue? Sequguteiax?) it is a solution looking for a problem. As is the whole idea of strapping any sort of motor to a pushbike. Sorry, E-bikes and the like are ......... crap? nonsense? a nun on a penny farthing? (Virgin on the ridiculous)

Lost WHITE CITY of the MONKEY GOD found after 500 years

Mark Plotkin, ethnobotanist, said: "This is clearly the most undisturbed rain forest in Central America. The importance of this place can’t be overestimated."

Lets get in there and fuck it up.

Spotty Ceres baffles boffins with bright patches

The light is on but nobody is home......

We don't need no steenkin' cabinet: Ericsson hangs base stations off masts

WTF?

"featuring one-bolt installation which fits in the tight spaces thanks to airflow innovations"

How does improved airflow make it possible to fit into tighter spaces? The two are not connected.

Whilst it may be that by improving the design of the case for improved airflow, improved airflow does not of itself make something fit into tighter spaces.

As a "good" Muslim, wearing looser underpants does not meant that I automatically now fit into more virgins than before.

$10,000 Ethernet cable promises BONKERS MP3 audio experience

Re: Not the whole story

Now I understand. what you have to do when you buy a cable is push a lot of electrons through it very quickly so that you replace the ones that came it with from the factory. Once you get the old electrons out and the new ones in that have been strained, crafted and modulated through the wiring in your house, the cable will sound `at home'.

Re: Any lawyers in?

Isn't this what non Intelligent Design folks call God in the Gaps?

Re: WAT HiFi

Fuck, I read that shit too. And about a dozen articles on 6moons. There are two things to say. Firstly like the man who sells Rolex watches, they are not selling time pieces, they are selling kudos and snob value. If you already have everything, including penicillin and you have a fortune 10 income then why wouldn't you buy these bloody things? You have nothing else to spend your money on and as anyone today can have an education or two toilets in their home you have to find something to display your financial if nothing else superiority. Point 2. When is a 0 not a 0? When it is an analogue signal. the IEEE standard which describes Ethernet over copper wire is the product of some people who routinely engage in rocket science. They decide what the required purity of the copper is, what the required guage of the wire is, the characteristics of the insulator, the twists which will reduce NEXT and FEXT all so that a Falling voltage edge is a 0 and a rising a 1. That is it. We are talking about a digital component and not an analogue one. any analogue happens after the DAC and if you feed the sound to your speakers through a bowl of cornflakes then it may sound somewhat different to sending it through Monster Cable. But any conductor which meets the requirements of the relevant IEEE standard is going to deposit 0's and 1's at the other end.

Re: Speed of electrons

No, not in this digital age. a linear amplifier would not do the trick, he wants a massively parallel token ring powered starnet clustercon exuberance extatisising malifluence incredulating widget grumplising wallet deflator, something like the cable being talked about.

Re: Speed of electrons

Except that Silver is a far better conductor than copper, in fact the best room temperature metallic conductor on the planet. The problem is not conduction or reluctance in copper or silver, it is in the use of silver as contacts. The silver will eventually tarnish unless coated with something meaning that all of those poor little electrons will become neurotic or tied up with ennui because of the presence of oxides. Then your piece of Benjamin Britain conducting Handles Fireworks music will come out as Sid Vicious on banjo with the violin parts played by Doug on the drums.

This optical disc will keep your gumble safe for 2,000 YEARS

One word

Bullshit.

Cost

I bought my first CD/R drive way back when. At the time the drive cost AU$5,000.00 wholesale. A single writable disk cost AU$180.00 wholesale. The rubbish bin to insert the first and subsequent failed $180.00 disks in cost nothing.

They will be expensive to start with and not so further down the track.

UK boffins DOUBLE distance of fiber data: London to New York WITHOUT a repeater

Re: That awkward memory moment.

Ok, I'll bite. what is the difference between accuracy and precision? Is it like the difference between tolerance and limit?

Spent the weekend watching Game of Thrones? You're a FAT LONELY SADDO

A new problem?

I seem to recall Samuel Pepys had problems with the theatre. Really all they are saying is that excess is excessive. One must Om or something and take the road less travelled, the middle one. Then you can be fat and sad and not subject to studies by people who live in a car in Texas.

The Burning Question of course is how do you get sufficient `scientists' into an Austin to perform a decent job.