Posts by maccy

FCC big cheese given Congressional roasting in reconfirmation bid

bipartisanship

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

P≠NP proof fails, Bonn boffin admits

Respect to Prof Blum ...

... for having a homepage that doesn't look like it has changed much since Netscape was the browser of choice.

Probably has more important things to do.

So, Nokia. What makes you think the world wants your phones?

about ten years ago ...

.... I said to anyone that would listen (basically just my 8 yr old daughter, but whatever*) that if nokia did an android, I would buy it like a shot. The nokias I owned just had bulletproof reception in the worst places. Bought an HTC instead (good phone, but not nokia standard) But now, a decade later ... bit late to the party, I think.

* doesn't listen now, but that's not unusual

One thought equivalent to less than a single proton in mass

Is there a units problem here?

"It was believed that the proton was about 0.877 femtometres, less than a trillionth of a millimetre. But now scientists have found the subatomic particle is 30 billionths of a per cent lighter than that estimate."

I thought I was 1.8m tall but it turns out I'm much heavier.

Shock: NASA denies secret child sex slave cannibal colony on Mars

An investigation is needed

I think we should send Alex Jones to Mars, to check out these disturbing allegations.

Train your self-driving car AI in Grand Theft Auto V – what could possibly go wrong?

The AI apocalypse:

Delivering 51,744 cans of Budweiser

Google must be Beaming as Apache announces its new top-level projects

Beam and Eagle. Apache. birthed revolutionised MapReduce data processing Dataflow Apache Spark Cloudera streaming-first framework Apache Beam Dataflow SDK software development KIT KIT KIT semantics "used within Google" Beam Flink Spark Apex open-source stacking Beam on top of Spark or Flink lowest-common-denominator problem "Still, it's an option" orders of magnitude promiscuously software engineer at Google and the project management committee chair execution engines excited state of the art Eagle Hadoop and Spark platforms analytics tool (tool hah ha) Hadoop, Spark, NoSQL yarn applications, JMX metrics, and daemon logs monitoring and alerting large-scale security monitoring generic solution domain experts

No, this is not spam. It's cut & paste - in order - from the article. Apart from the KIT KIT KIT and (tool hah ha) which I just thought added a little spice.

HBO slaps takedown demand on 13-year-old girl's painting because it used 'Winter is coming'

Lawyers are coming ...

It's white and a bit sticky.

British banks chuck smartphone apps out of Windows

Sometimes the stock photos end up very strange.

This one reminds me of 9/11

UK warships to have less firepower than 19th century equivalents as missiles withdrawn

The reason our navy is hopeless is ...

... because the purpose of the defence budget is to keep BAE shareholders happy.

Actual functioning warships are a low priority.

Russian banks floored by withering DDoS attacks

Leaving security to the end user = no security

Your two rent-a-quotes Kennerly & McEvatt must realize this surely?

One solution proposed is that manufacturers must implement passwords properly e.g. by putting a random password on each device. This is difficult and you can't really leave security to the manufacturer either, especially the hundreds of small Chinese outfits that work on thin margins and don't give a toss.

CE marks that require security would help, but since the internet is global and CE marks are Europe only, that help would be minimal.

The problem is the internet protocols. So we're fucked.

Maybe someone could write a scanner which finds these open IoT devices and changes their password?

Silicon Valley's oligarchs got a punch in the head – and that's actually good thing

Peter Thiel?

and Palmer Fuckey?

Open-source Sesame! Alibaba promises super-size magic for Java

completely irrelevant but ...

... am I the only one who thinks Jack Ma looks like Takashi out of Akira?

A quick google search suggests I am.

Will AI spell the end of humanity? The tech industry wants you to think so

If AI spells the end of humanity ...

I for one will be very disappointed.

After all, if spell-checkers can't distinguish between "end of humanity" and "AI", what hope is there for civilization?

Today the web was broken by countless hacked devices – your 60-second summary

"The blame is not with dyn"

No, but it isn't with cheapo IoT either. DDoS seems to be built into the structure of the internet. Any system that relies on millions of components being "nice" is a system that is doomed to fail.

Meet Deliveroo's ‘bold and impactful’ new logo. No, really

Following the new two-fingers up logo ..

... Deliveroo will be changing its name to Fuckyoo

Reavers! Google patent would affix pedestrians to car hoods

bored, nothing else to do but troll ...

I guess the reason Google are the first to patent this idea is because it is fucking stupid.

You wanted innovation? We gave you Clippy the Paperclip in your IM client

To be fair ...

the AI identified it as a Bernese Mountain dog. That's pretty good, even if no idea whether it's right or not. Maybe you wouldn't use the canned response, but you could build on it. For example -

Me: Wow, you have a Bernese mountain dog! They are so cool!

Them: err.. we told you that like 6 years ago. When we got it.

or -

Me: Wow, cute dog. Is it a from the Bernese Mountains?

Them: beats me. rescue. shits everywhere.

or -

Me: Ha his tongue is hanging out the side. What a dope.

Them: Fuck you

Cat fight: Watch out YouTube, here comes Facebook

Patient ex-cat

I'd guess by the age of the laptop that the cat is looking at, the cat could very well be dead by now.

Hi-res audio folk to introduce new rules and weed out impure noises

for dogs only

"the subtle effects of hypersonic sound (above the range of human hearing)"

... because it is SO important to have sounds you can't hear.

The Martian: Matt Damon sciences the sh*t out of the red planet

I'm going to have a hard time keeping Dr Mann out of my head.

Cooper: Dr. Mann there's a 50/50 chance your gonna kill yourself.

Dr. Mann: Those are the best odds I've had in years.

Who uses the Universal Credit system? ALMOST NOBODY, says report

Re: Benefits of benefits

Of course a government can create jobs you tit. DWP just created a whole load of jobs for IT workers struggling to create Universal Credit. And apparently they don't even need to produce a working system at the end of it.

Drones swarm over bearded Brit billionaire's island getaway

The drones can't be very good ...

... there's no sign of a gigantic tit called Richard in the middle of the island.

New .london domains touted tomorrow amid usual tech hypegasm

"London leads the world in technology"??

Fuck - when did that happen? I must have been asleep for the last ten years.

Facebook swallows Oculus VR goggle-geeks. Did that really happen?

MONEY

Over at Oculus, co-founder and CEO Brendan Iribe added: "We are excited to ... get lots and lots of money OH FUCK YEAH MONEY MONEY LOTS OF FUCKING MONEY .... err, sorry , I mean, we're excited to work with Mark and the Facebook team to deliver the very best virtual .. ah fuck it. It's just money. Where's my Ferrari?"

Google pulls SCHAFT out of military honeypot, sprays gold at bot team

Who writes these headlines?

Seriously, they need their own byline.

UK.gov! frets! over! Yahoo! exodus! to! RIPA-free! Dublin!

The move to Ireland is a ...

... cover story for tax avoidance

Google's Drive SLASH, secret 'big upgrade': Coincidence? Hardly

Title Optional

maybe they are dropping the price because their product is a bit, well, shit compared to competitors. Dropbox has _never_ failed me, while the gdrive client has frequently (>2 times per week) decided to simply stop working without telling anyone.

Only reason I'm still with gdrive is I'm a cheapskate (and a bit invested in picasa), and maybe this pricing acknowledges the near-freetard spending profile of Google's users.

Flying in the US? Remember to leave your hand grenades at home

journalist manipulation

Usually, these sort of stories get "released" in response to some embarassing incident that puts the TSA in a bad light. I seem to remember reading about grenades in luggage sometime last year too.

Anyone know what sort of idiocy the security theatre has been up to recently?

Dear Linus, STOP SHOUTING and play nice - says Linux kernel dev

He's right but ...

... you can be right without FUCKING SWEARING.

Quantum transistors at room temp

also, what's with all these SEMI-conductors?

We need proper good old fashioned conductors, not this half-assed semi shit. That'll make your computer thingies go faster.

Acorn founder: SIXTH WAVE of tech will wash away Apple, Intel

google car

400,000 miles of random driving? You would have thought the computer behind the wheel would have sobered up by now.

Coke? Windows 8 is Microsoft's 'Vista moment'. Again

I'm pretty sure it's not "telemetrics"

it's just plain "metrics". The "tele-" bit means that you are very far away from something. On the other hand, maybe they were very far away from the user, and that's how the UI turned out the way it did.

Eric Schmidt defends Google's teeny UK tax payouts - again

"We empower literally billions of pounds of start-ups through our advertising network and so forth,"

I think he meant to say:

"We make literally billions of pounds through our advertising network and so forth,"

More honest, unlike their tax arrangements.

Vietnamese high school kids can pass Google interview

If those kids are as good as a Google engineer ...

.. why not hire some to maintain Google Reader? (and while they're at it, fix the long-lasting bugs in Google Drive client).

I suspect the reason Vietnamese kids can pass the Goog entrance exam is because Google are nowhere near as good as they think they are.

Google Drive goes titsup for MILLIONS of users

google's cloud is ok ...

.. but the Google drive client sucks ass. Constantly dies without any notification. How come all of Google's "brilliant" engineers can't produce a client that's as stable as dropbox's??

UK's 'Nobel prize for engineering' given to 'inventors of the interwebs'

The more prestigious the prize tries to be, the fewer risks it takes. I predict this prize will fizzle in a few years as the organizers run out of obvious choices, and they haven't the guts to give it to someone interesting.

First video inside thinking fish's brain captured by boffins

A lightbulb moment!

pity it turned on inside the little chap's head instead of floating above it in a cartoony manner.

Beware the coming of the ROGUE CLOUDS, wails Symantec

The solution is right here:

"The most commonly cited reason for firing up a rogue cloud was to save time and money, according to Symantec."

So the solution is to make the in-house cloud easier and cheaper.

Oh, wait, I don't think I've ever seen an in-house solution with those characteristics, because they are designed to keep management happy rather than the workers who use it.

Steve Jobs' Apple yacht freed after family settles the bill

seriously ugly

I would have said:

fuck it, it's yours. No way am I paying more than I already have for that p.o.s.

'It’s called capitalism. We are proudly capitalistic. I’m not confused about this'

I think Schmidt IS confused about this

Capitalism is a system where the means of production - the capital if you will - are owned by one group of people (the capitalists) who then hire another group of people (the workers) to use the capital to create good which are sold for profit.

It has nothing to say about "maximizing shareholder value" (there might not even be any shareholders). It says nothing about whether avoiding tax is good or bad (and Adam Smith would say it's bad, because it gives advantage to companies with good lawyers, rather than good products, and Smith wanted the competition to be between products so as to yield the greatest good for the greatest number).

Schmidt was confused. He should have said: "It’s called greed. We are proudly greedy." But that wouldn't sound so good.

Astronomers find biggest black hole, 17 BILLION times the size of Sun

but its not black: definately mostly orange, with a white bit in the middle

that's because it's an inverse fried egg, which probably solves the chicken and egg dilemma in a very tasty way.

Apple's skinny new iMac line: Farewell, optical drives

thin? why?

I just don't get why thin is such a huge selling point for a desktop. Makes sense for a laptop or a tablet, but the desktop just sits there. You don't have to lift it. Smallish is good, but obsessing about thin suggests they're distracting you from the fact that its FUCKING EXPENSIVE and they could, if they cared, give you the same performance for a whole lot less, if they'd just let it get a few mm thicker.

Last month ties for WARMEST September on RECORD

lack of thought exhibited

some idiot said:

"According to NOAA, all of the top 10 warmest years on record have occurred after 1997, when skeptics claimed global warming stopped."

One is not inconsistent with the other. If the global temperature flatlined on average after 1997, that would mean that global warming had stopped. But the years since 1997 would still be warmer than the preceding years so, with a bit of randomness, would continue to throw out records.

Personally, I think we're staking a LOT on what could easily be explained as random fluctuations.

Asus doubles up phone-slate combo's specs with Padfone 2

should i call it ...

a phablet? or a tone?

It's official: Apple will reveal 'a little more' on October 23

I've got something to show you

(unzips fly)

You have to stand pretty close to see it

The new iPenis MINI !!

Who said size didn't matter?

VR pioneer invents 'illumination-as-a-service'

Each light can be programmed to do 'most anything.

Like turn on. Then off.

Democratic congresswomen 'less feminine in appearance' than Republicans

age a factor here too

the pictures look more like hip grandma vs. scary bitch, rather than more or less feminine, but what do I know?

Apple 'hasn't really run out of iPhone 5s AT ALL'

and if they have or haven't run out, why should I care?

IT

IS

A

PHONE.

How is it _possible_ to give a flying fuck about a phone? It makes calls, it connects to the internet, it farts, it plays a few games.

Obviously I'm not the target market.

Mine's the one with the TC in the pocket (the H fell off a week ago)

W3C names four new editors of HTML5 spec

Clarke's law should have said:

Any sufficiently large bureaucracy is indistinguishable from a snail.