Posts by KrisMac

Online map suppressing crime reporting, says survey

Indeed...

"It is the crime that impacts negatively upon communities. ..."

Sound a lot like "Guns dont kill people - people kill people...."

Same self-justification for doing nothing....

Oracle's Android claims slashed by US patent authorities

Oracle may not have known that the claims were invalid...

... remember that that bought all of these patents as a job-lot when they ate the Sun.... Due diligence only goes so far - they may have had every reason to believe that what they were paying for was valuable stuff, (and Sun certainly wouldnt have been trying to give them the idea that the patents were worthless!)

For Oracle to be seen as criminal, they would have had to have had every patent re-examined prior to the takeover and still gone ahead anyway.

For what it is worth, I personally think they SHOULD have had every patent re-examined prior to the sale - it would have prevented a load of nonsense, but probably decimated what was left of the shareholder value in Sun....

Bitcoin collapses on malicious trade

So.....

"...first, steal the Bitcoin account, then use a large trade to drive the value down, buy the coins back at the new, lower value, and then try to trade out completely..."

Naked short selling hits the virtual world... I'm surprised its taken this long....

Think PCs will drop in price? Think again, warns Intel

The prattlings of a CFO...

...to an investor meeting have effect on one and only one market - the "share" market. As such it amount to chest thumping and boasting - it will have absolutly no impact on the PC, phone or erver market - or ant other market where real comodities are traded as opposed to the imaginary assets dished out by stocks and bonds traders...

Submarine seized by pirates turns up in Vegas pawnshop

"Bruce" Rogers???

... I say that the time loop has finally closed and we have all come into the Twenty First Century to catch up on good ol' Buck... now posing as semi retired truck driver.

...I bet he was really trying to recover his space-plane-fighter-jet-submarine that someone had rumbled hiding in a dicrete back-yard location...

Use of Weapons declared best sci-fi film never made

Surface Detail

I read 'Surface Detail' recently. I didn't think it was the best Culture novel ever, but the concept of the 'Hells' blew me away. One of the best parts of the Culture series is the fact that Bank's vision of interconnected virtual worlds is only a hair beadth away form current reality.

I can easily suspend my disbelief to imagine a world where everyone is 100% integrated into the 'net' - afeter all I watch my kids on Facebook all the time and despite the scary implications they are certainly 'immersed' in what they do....

Is there anything to find on bin Laden's hard drive?

Anti-Symmetric Keys???

...am I the only one who read that line in the 'Mujahideen Secrets' image as 'Anti-Semitic Keys'?

Or is the whole thing just a late Middle-Eastern April Fools joke.....

Apple bags iCloud.com domain for $4.5m, says report

yeah but...

... dontcha think that 'iPad' is just a little bit about the underlying tech as well - sorta/kinda/maybe??

And really - who knows what 'cloud' really means anyway?

To me its just a 'back to the future' return to my mainframe days as a student. The 'User Experience' is completely untouched by the tech and what you percieve to be the experience is solely the domain of the delivery mode, (browser, thin client or SaaS service portal)...

Australians can’t read or count

Mr Disraeli missed one...

probably becasue the wire services were still in their infancy in his day...

".. and wire-service hack journalism..."

The author makes his point extremely well - Press releases that are mindlessly repeated by lazy journo's too stupid to read behind the 'news' are nothing bu sucker-bait

Google 'clamps down' on world of Android partners

Not Open? Since When did 'Open' mean 'Anarchic'?

Maybe my 20+ years in the IT industry had given me poor eyesight from VDU burnout, but can someone point me to a 'successful' Open Source project that is not under the 'control' of someone?

* Linux == Linus Torvalds (if you don't believe me, just try publishing crap to the kernel).

* Apache == Apache Foundation, (via registered Comitter List)

* GNU == Free Software Foundation, (Richard Stallman et al.)

* OpenOffice == Oracle, (nee SUN)

* LibreOffice == The Document Foundation, (via the Steetring Committee)

I cannot for the life of me see what the difference between Google's approach to project management and the apporaches taken by these other projects is. Nor can I see why a project should be alloed to decend into anarchy, simply because it was originally punted by Google.

This is just Microsoft and their pet media hacks trying to sling mud/FUD...

Nothing new here - move on

Oracle and the Attack of the Killer Stack

Freudian Slip?

"...Dell has to bulk out its networking offering and get base supplication software..."

Yes... If things go on as they are we certainly will be back to worshipping at the temple of Mainframe...

Assange ambushes Australian Prime Minister on live TV

Your conclusions about the person may not be wrong, but your focus is on the wrong target

I do not disagree that Mr Assange is his own worst enemy, but have you ever seen a time when government back-room dealings and underhanded hypocracy have been so thoroughly exposed?

Mr Assange my not have done himself any favours, but he has certainly done the rest of us a lot of good by allowing us to see the slime that 'lead' us for what they really are.

Focussing your rage on Mr Assange serves only to distract you from the real villians of the piece - those who have committed all the offences againt the world that Mr Assange has dug up and thrown in their faces.

MOSSAD SPY VULTURE seized in Saudi Arabia

I suspect...

... that the bird vered off course after being released at high altitude from a paper plane due to excessive consumption of this: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/12/31/paris_cocktail/

PARIS concocts commemorative cocktail

..or what about?

PARISian Drop Out -- applys to both the organic and inorganic birds... and probably describes the results of imbibing...

BURNING LUST for SEXY BUSTY BLONDES - Science explains

...the 'age-genius curve' dictates that...

...Albert Eienstein was either the wrinkliest young man in town or he was banging anything that moved till the day he died....

That means there must be at least another 30 years or so left for me to get smart and get laid by bevvies of Marylin's.... ho hum, no rush...

NASA to make MAJOR ALIENS REVELATION this week

.... and I love what I want to show the doctor... !!!!

OMFG ROFL LoLZ! :-)

and other 1337 shit like that...

My lost Cobol years: Integrating legacy management

COBOL has lingetring (positive) impacts even where the code isn't still being run..

I trained on COBOL back in the heady days before PC's cam along to ruin my dreams, firmly convinced that my working life would be spent in the warm and loving embrace of a brightly lit, white walled, environementally secure cocoon in the basement of a bank somewhere.

Unfortunately things didn't quite work out that way and I ended up supporting horrid things called Users continually invading my networks. Over time I have developed considerable hero worship for the BOFH.

That said, that grounding in structured programming has served me very well. My junior staff are often left slack-jawed when they underestimate my ability to read a bit of code and leave their latest 1337 bit of java script shattered on the cutting room floor. Those of us who went through the period of time when memory mattered, and efficiency was king will always be one step ahead of the kids who don't even know what those words mean.

COBOL, and the lessons that it taught us in terms of the correct approach to application development for business is still helping to keep us on the straight and narrow. But God help the organisations that have put all of its grey-beards out to pasture...

Dell kept buyers in dark over hardware problems, say docs

We must have been on the 'Going to Jump Ship' list...

All through the 'capacitor crisis' Dell kept in good contact with us - and replaced motherboards on a global basis without question once we had established that the issue was theirs.

What surprises me about that is that our overall numbers of PC's purchased per year, (@ 800 -900 per annum globally), is probably below the threshold of visibility for Dell in the normal course of events.

1984's MacPaint source code hits web

Not all change is for the better....

".... In those far-away days, "write tight" wasn't a mere catchphrase — it was a necessity ..."

It's a pity that leter developers never have to practice writing to minimal memory models... perhaps some of the code bloat that modern PC and Mac memory capacities allow might be tempered by better coding practices.