Posts by streaky

Tor is '90 per cent of the net' claims City of London Police Commish – and he's dead wrong

Re: Maybe...

I see CoLP bobbies on the street all the time. They do exist - quite commonly actually. Once made the mistake of asking one for directions that every Londoner should know (when I first moved down to London) - absolutely no idea at all.

Microsoft C# chief Hejlsberg: Our open-source Apache pick will clear the FUD

Re: It is not a cancer

"Apart from the fact that C# does not run on Linux. That'd be Mono, which is a subset"

Smoke more crack. Mono is the runtime, like .NET on windows - it's still mostly C# the language.

Re: It is not a cancer

"keeping C# relevant"

Spot the non-dev 4000 miles away. C# runs the roost in modern software on windows and linux. If it's not straight C for performance reasons it's almost certainly C#. Why? Because it's a decent language that's why. The way it executes is iffy but the language itself...

Re: I hope Apple do similar

"still sue and badger users for supposed infringements"

Users? You mean global megacorps like Apple and Google. Users?

"they've lost a good deal of their monopoly"

Did they really ever have a monopoly and have they really lost it or just missed new markets being created? They're still as massive as ever in the desktop (home/business) and ent server markets and MS office is bigger than ever. People have got pissy because Microsoft didn't have an iPod competitor and missed tablets (Microsoft shouldn't reasonably be getting into hardware on that scale anyways).

British boffin tells Obama's science advisor: You're wrong on climate change

Re: Mathematician vs. a "Real" Scientist...

"I believe it is arrogance and hubris to think that we have the first clue about how this world really works"

Don't talk about "real scientists" then follow it up with "I believe", it looks a bit silly.

Not for nothing but it isn't arrogant - it's pretty clear to most people the planet is broken and the data correlates. The discussion is the final effect.

Don't believe the hyper-converged hype: Why are we spending stupid amounts on hardware?

Re: What is your rant aimed at?

Sounds remarkably like a rant I've been levelling at Nutanix for quite some time. Their product is hardware boxes despite the fact it's all off the shelf gear and it's the software doing all the work - but can you buy just a software licence? Nope. The hardware is overpriced being the issue - you can't see the real costs of the software and frankly you'd rather just buy the software given the chance.

Edit: To be fair it looks like you can actually buy Nutanix as software now which renders their specific involvement in this story moot but they as-was were doing exactly the kind of thing I imagine the writer is talking about.

Find a partner? Nah, these students ALL play with same tools in giant CLUSTER-SHUCK

GeForce

"not sure if you can get HPC programs to recognise and use a GeForce GPU without a lot of messing around"

As long as you can get CUDA drivers for it I doubt it'd matter (the software would use the CUDA API unless some fool put a nonsense arbitrary limit in the software in which is highly unlikely given there are supercomputers that use actual graphics cards out there).

By the way you're talking about a 4500 GBP versus an 800 quid card - for the sake of a bit of RAM if you don't need it you have a massive price:flops advantage.

Snowden never blew a whistle, US spy boss claims

Re: No public trial; no public evidence

To be honest - I couldn't imagine how you could try him in public, regardless of if he's right, if they try him in public they'd have to stick with their cover stories.

"Low Level Analyst"

The US govt spends a lot of it's time trying to frame him as low level - assuming they're right surely somebody has to be asking why, if true, he had access to so much information that is protectively marked in a way that makes people think maybe they're lying.

Is nobody in the Obama administration seriously asking this basic question assuming that's what they've been told and they're choosing to believe it?

Sony on the ropes after revising losses UP to $1.3 BEEELLION

Re: It's not my birthday today!

"If it is the gamer angle then seriously as a xbox owner and live user for a good 9/10 years I want Sony to succeed because if they fail and it is just Microsoft in the mainstream console industry then gamers will get screwed over royally"

Gamers already get screwed over because of *both* these companies inability to allow market forces to drive their products - they both throw money at bad game "exclusives" and distort the market, destroy the ability of the industry to be either an art form or creative and original.

Don't worry though because Microsoft is next.

Minecraft players can now download Denmark – all of it – in 1:1 scale

"use of tnt has been banned"

Yarly? *digs out a hacked client*. Those protections never work if you don't want them to...

Cheat Win XP death: Your handy guide to keeping snubbed operating system ticking over

Re: Dear author

12 year old OS with a very broken SSL stack (which is something you want in the current security environment) - and no patches for new security issues, much less the old non-security bugs that were never and will never be fixed.

If your a) home or b) business IT environment includes basically any of this you should be quite possibly be fired and/or shot - and if you don't know why it's a problem: lynched.

I QUIT: Mozilla's anti-gay-marriage Brendan Eich leaps out of door

Re: Animals

"either you agree with free speech and democracy, or you don't"

Hold on are you seriously trying to deny this guy's right to comment here?

Also not for nothing but only banana republics enshrine a totally unabridged right to freedom of speech without consequences - for reasons that would be blatant to most toddlers.

UK regulators: We will be CHECKING UP on banks' IT systems

Re: Kinda Missing the point

Completely different issues, and frankly there's no reason they can't do both.

Erm

This has just become a thing after computers being a major part of the business for many decades now? Also enjoy your flights to India!

Haunted Empire calls Apple 'a cult built around a dead man.' Tim Cook calls it 'nonsense'

Re: ADKC

Well anybody who bothered to read what their CFO said at the time knows they were in more dire trouble than Jobs would admit at Macworld - Microsoft could have in effect ended Apple with a protracted legal fight regardless of even that.

Also not for nothing but Apple's market cap is (provably) utterly nonsense. Claiming Apple to be the most profitable company in the world makes you look a tool - and anybody with eyes can see their YoY profits are walking backwards. This is not a company deserving of it's market cap.

ADKC

Firstly - the whole Dell thing came about when Apple collapsed and had to be rescued from *bankruptcy* by Microsoft. The entire ADKC record should stop at this point, possibly with an apology.

Not for nothing but basically everything on there is either still true or Apple have taken steps to mitigate the issue. The city has a love-affair with Apple but their sales figures bear no relation to their market cap - in the real world they should fail, and as I mentioned before; actually have previously.

Object to #YearOfCode? You're a misogynist and a snob, says the BBC

I've said it before many times - the key here isn't blasting code at kids, it's finding the ones who are naturally interested (not necessarily that they're good at heavy maths, we don't need that) via some sort of taste-based learning - and then nurture them, probably with some genuinely taxing, but fun, lesson structure.

I've been through this country's education system recently *enough* to know what the issues are and now I'm a professional software developer. Probably the biggest single issue for me is that teachers don't get paid enough to attract people who know what they're doing to teaching short of the possibility that they just sold their faceback app to google for 43Bn and now want to give their time to the public good (which realistically isn't going to happen).

It's true that all kids should be learning how computers work a bit more over just learning how to input data into excel (and how to deal with macs crashing every 30 seconds) like we did at school, but not all should be writing code.

As for misogyny, I don't think there is anybody who doesn't want more women writing code (and thusly - in context - girls learning it like us boys did when we were kids) but the issue isn't the men who are doing it so much as the way girls are raised to like barbie and play with their Mattel cooking-related toys which sets them on the path to being housewives in the first place.

Judge: Google owes patent troll a 1.36% cut of AdWords' BEELLIONS

Re: Hats off to the Troll who stabbed snoring Gulliver in the eyeball.

"Microsoft's taxation of Android"

Microsoft's "taxation" of Android is based in legitimate invention of an actual thing that Google has no issue paying. Microsoft have been making smartphone software since before Google even existed - huge difference.

Bill Gates is once again the richest man on Earth

Re: The rich get richer ...

"The green eyed envy of hypocritical socialists never ceases to amaze"

Ah you must have caught the disease known as "American".

The left loves Bill Gates to bits, because he does what the right claims to want to do instead of paying taxes but conveniently never actually bother whatever their real effective tax rate. If more of the right were like Bill we wouldn't need taxes at all. Instead they like to sit on dead money doing nothing.

Bill got his KBE from a left wing government, but whatever.

Google poised to become world's first TREEELLION DOLLAR company?

Re: Pha!

Isn't a billion unless you're at least 60 years old.

Also ask your nearest software developer why long scale is nonsense.

Bank of America: Bitcoin could become THE currency of e-commerce

Re: Flawed assumptions, Dani Eder's proposed solutions

They will agree because it'll be easier to mine for transactions (in other words earn money for confirming them), it's simply a case of updating the protocol. The issue is more figuring out when it needs to happen.

Not for nothing but lets not pretend you can't use cash to anonymously buy drugs or have somebody killed.

Bitcoin price soars after US Senate hearing on 'legit' currency

Re: Have to legalize it to tax it.

"levy taxes on Bitcoin transactions" - if you're earning them in some way and you convert them into a real currency you're going to be liable for taxation as earning/investments anyways. Probably worth noting.

If you spent 100 quid and now they're worth 20k you're going to have a major cap gains issue, otherwise you're committing tax evasion.

Schiller: 'Almost everyone' at Apple works on iPhones - not Macs or anything

Knowing people that do and have worked for apple:

... we call this perjury where I come from.

This is all :)

'I'm BIG, I'm BALD and I'm LOUD!' Blubbering Ballmer admits HE was Microsoft's problem

Rate of change

"But the rate of change wasn't fast enough"

Nono the problem is you're doing this at all. Sure it's legitimate to have "cloud" as part of your business; as with Amazon. The idea that Microsoft should be basing its entire corporate structure on a marketing term is the definition of insanity.

Hey, is that CSI: Hackers on TV? Oh, it's Microsoft's Cybercrime Center

Re: Apparently

Yeah that was gonna my comment, looks terrible like that. But then guess they probably stuck it on the wall and snapped it.

GPU secrets unveiled for student cluster warriors

And that you can make your own.

Google 'fesses up: Yup, we're KILLING OFF IE9 support for Gmail, Apps

Re: Email is email, is email

"Hotmail functioned absolutely fine back in the 90's when I started using it"

And was probably using Ajax before it was called Ajax and standardised (XMLHttpRequest) given that Microsoft created it exactly for Outlook Web/Hotmail.

Berners-Lee: 'Appalling and foolish' NSA spying HELPS CRIMINALS

Re: More to the point, let's fix the code

"Signals intelligence agencies have been breaking codes for a hundred years now"

They wouldn't be able to break them without flaws introduced into the system (see how Snowdon said just use PGP and you'll be fine) - at least not with conventional computing and quantum computers aren't actually useful to this degree yet (and we have other crypto schemes ready to go when they do which banks/governments/militaries etc are already using).

The flaws they introduce into the systems are precisely the problem. If you look at the history of cyphers and hashing systems you see all kinds of issues with predictability of algo's - people find this stuff not by accident and it's highly possible that a) they were introduced intentionally and b) criminal orgs and other state intel agencies found them *before* security researchers did.

Dark matter: Good news, everyone! We've found ... NOTHING AT ALL

Re: Follow The Pioneers!

"with no fear of ever being contradicted by experiment"

You're confusing science and religion there. Not for nothing but yes there are alternative theories - and there's also the possibility that we could just be measuring it wrong or missing some basic fact about lets say, gravity.

When stuff goes "wrong" it's always the most exciting time in science because it gives people a chance to posit bold, entirely new theories. Imagine if you will if LHC had disproven the existence of the Higgs what sort of world we'd be living in today.

Win XP? Your PLAGUE risk is SIX times that of Win 8 - NOW

I've seen banks recently running 2k so yeah. There's also a major optician's chain that runs XP on their store customer db access systems with what looks remarkably like an old MS access app.

HTC phone STOPS BULLET, saves Florida gas station clerk's life

Re: I wonder...

No it's at what point Apple will patent the bulletproof phone. Dunno maybe I'm getting cynical in my old age too.

Coding: 'suitable for exceptionally dull weirdos'

Re: algorithm != algebra

Which is why "professionals" are complaining about "muh jobs are being outsourced" as "locally written stuff" falls over at the next sneeze

I'm not complaining about anything of the sort, because I'm perfectly employable and get job offers in the UK constantly. But then I never did Java at uni so I'm fixed for life.

Re: algorithm != algebra

"LISP should be enough for anyone"

.. that never wants to be employed/employable, yeah.

DON'T BREW THAT CUPPA! Your kettle could be a SPAMBOT

Re: I suppose,

"Thought we'd already established that there were backdoors" - hasn't been established at all, indeed all the evidence points to not the case, and if it ever was the case it'd be spotted fairly early.

Try not to confuse American protectionism with actual security/economic policy.

Re: picture

Pretty obvious from that picture that the device isn't going to do what it's claimed to do. The minimum size would be like around the mini pcie wifi cards + some extra gubbins for processing + extra for dealing with the power.

Unless China is working with, I don't know, alien technology and have suddenly surpassed the technical capabilities of western countries, which is extremely doubtful.

Sueballs lobbed at Tosh, Samsung and LG over 'optical disk cartel'

Seems to me..

That these companies also control the LCD et al panel market - i.e. if it's possible they're doing it with optical media it's highly likely the same is true of panels.

Surface Pro 2: It's TOOL-PROOF and ultimately destined for LANDFILL

Ah but it's Microsoft, so thumbs down.

There is a serious point here - people need a proper education in when we left clock relevance behind > 10 years ago.

"But it's a 1.7GHz quad-core processor, just like the old one, so you're not likely to see much performance improvement"

Well here's a sentiment from 2000. GJ reg! Not like two wildly different gens of CPU could have wildly different performance or power usage requirements or anything. (I have no idea what is in either but the statement is patently absurd xbox gamer thinking).

MPs to review laws on UK spy-snoopery after GCHQ Tempora leaks

Re: @ tom dial

"Only when there is a reason (like a defendable "reasonable suspicion") should they collect data"

The point at which they start to collect data from people is the point at, lets say the police, want to tap your phones. They go to a court and say "here's the evidence this guy is a Tango - can we please do this".

Government agencies are woefully ignorant of IT security. There's several issues - the (relevant, UK) law clearly states they shouldn't be doing this anyway. They're going to lose it all to some kid with aspergers who's going to pwn your bank account with the information he collects from them or just use it to embarrass people - and chances are that's going to be you. On top of that it's just a really expensive way of getting no relevant intelligence at all.

And all those reasons are just related to GCHQ boasting about how well connected they are into the UK infrastructure - it ignores the fact that the backdoors they've apparently had inserted all over the shop damage the security of *everybody* - and this is in a country where you can be compelled to produce crypto keys by a court or face prison for an unlimited time anyway. Why would they need backdoors in that situation if they didn't know for a fact courts would agree at the stuff they're up to?

Re: streaky Dong Jefe Hmmm... not sure where to begin with this...

"the authorities can and do monitor snail mail, right down to using x-ray scanners and the like to read through the envelope"

I don't doubt they monitor mail from targeted individuals - this is kinda my point - we're talking about a mass trawl of basically everybody regardless of who they are - it would be hugely expensive. And hey guess what you'd have to take the volumes of mail off civilian royal mail employees who frankly every now and then would say what was happening no matter how much you threatened them.

Re: streaky Translation

"Was forced into the life of a virtual recluse, and his ability to communicate with his followers massively disrupted by EXACTLY the monitoring you're whining about, AFTER it had been used to track and kill or capture many of his followers"

Seems to be the case that a) he wasn't a recluse at all - just an electronic recluse - and b) the Pakistani intelligence services knew where he was and they didn't pick that up either. Regardless of all that he was still able to command a very large international terrorist organisation from his front porch so..

It may reduce terrorists to a position where they have to pass paper around but hey, stock markets used to work like that too. It's slightly less efficient, but in an emergency you can also use more public means - [provably] basically none of what they're doing is having any effect and it's costing the taxpayer in both the US and the UK pretty huge volumes of cash.

Re: Dong Jefe Hmmm... not sure where to begin with this...

"Or had to check the street for any discarded rubbish that might be hiding an IED?"

I did this in canary wharf like 3 days ago - some kind person had decided to dump a waitrose bag with unidentified stuff in it, and bankers were walking past it like they're not in a reasonably tight security cordon (it is easy to forget these things). I took a look inside it without touching because the obvious thing to me is it might be an IED (having spent a lot of time growing up on military bases and being aware of where I was at the time).

Because people don't give a damn doesn't mean they're not at risk - but it doesn't justify invasion in their *personal space* either. How often do GCHQ mass-trawl documents sent by snail mail? Oh yeah - never. Why is that I wonder?

Re: Translation

Or another translation would be "They said they didn't do it and we believed them".

Now, I'm all for invasive surveillance - in a different way I want to see more of it - but it should be targeted at specific individuals. You go around hoovering up a whole internet's worth of data it's going to be expensive, and you're going to end up with massive volumes of data you can only deal with by sampling. Then you get into a situation where you're going to miss things because you're only really looking at 1MB in every TB or whatever and that's all youtube videos.. Then to get to that point you're massively invading the privacy of innocent people and pissing off supposedly friendly foreign governments - and for what? Where are the success stories of all this?

Bin Laden was caught by an anonymous tip-off not broad surveillance - and they've patently missed many obvious terrorist incidents where the people involved were pretty well welded to the internet previous to the attacks and followed some shady people on twitter (which you can look at as public data rather than slurping up bandwidth).

Re: Translation

The actual translation is " we have concluded that GCHQ has not circumvented or attempted to circumvent UK law*

*For parts of their work which involved scooping data out of US systems, we didn't bother looking at all the data they're hoovering up *inside* the UK's borders which is covered by RIPA, and that CGHQ were clearly breaking that law in spirit and in fact.

**We took their word for it on the first part and didn't bother turning up with police to check for ourselves, because frankly we didn't want to know."

LG Display: No one buys TVs any more, but mobe screens? KerCHING

Re: How about ...

"How about manufacturing the 'television' part in a separate box and matching it with displays that can be used to replace computer monitors?"

No this is the problem we're in now.

Appallingly low quality computer monitors based on TV, leaves people sitting on old tech that's just as good - i.e. not buying new PC monitors. I've been waiting many months to throw cash at the first manufacturer of a monitor with a LM270WQ1-SLB1 in it (coincidentally an LG panel) - possibly with intent to fly to Korea/Japan to pick one up personally but nobody will make them despite it being at the same price point as every other panel and there being vast supplies of them out there.

Leaky security could scuttle global ship-tracking system

Re: Invented before the internet

AIS was never intended to be secure as far as I'm aware - GPS is also open to spoofing too frankly. There's no entry requirements to messing around with either but for the ability to transmit radio. Okay GPS is slightly tougher to hurt the military aspect and anything you do without massive power is going to be fairly local but still..

Windows 8.1: Read this BEFORE updating - especially you, IT admins

What Microsoft have developed a particular hatred for is power users that were never likely to jump ship to Apple anyway - but are now probably running a lot of Linux gear. So oops.

Hollywood: How do we secure high-def 4K content? Easy. Just BRAND the pirates

Re: To be honest

Optimum viewing distance for a 20ft screen would be about the point it fills your vision - closer to the 10-15ft mark. Also your entire wall is the answer.

Wikileaks FAILS to start Twitter bitchfight with Guardian hack

Re: In dire need of bigging it up.

Because it gets media who don't know any better writing about them again. It's PR for Toddlers 101.