Posts by spold

Think of a number: A tale of iffy discount codes, supermarket loyalty cards and Hotels.com

Re: selling the discount codes for between £200 and £750

Tesco Everyday Value

UN warns of global e-waste wave as amount of gadgets dumped jumps 21% in 5 years

Re: So start legislation...

...not to mention I can buy a new printer cheaper than getting a new toner cartridge, and that many printer manufacturers have toner cartridge chips that are just designed to interfere with using re-cycled or OEM cartridges.

Boffins baffled as supergiant star just vanishes – either it partially blew itself apart or quietly turned into a black hole

Re: Two alternative options

...no Pag's fault again - Slo-Time envelope.

Nice game of Cricket anyone?

Russia returns to space tourism and offers a first citizen spacewalk

Spacewalks for Space Tourists...

I'm sorry our records show that your reservation was only until today.... [shove]

Maybe there is hope for 2020: AI that 'predicts criminality' from faces with '80% accuracy, no bias' gets in the sea

Re: Training data?

...they are always stealing hearts.

Fujitsu, Japan strong-Arm their way to the top with world's fastest-known super: 415-PFLOPS Fugaku

Finally....

...they found Gene Amdahl's diary jottings in the cupboard.

(one for the IT historians)

The girl with the dragnet tattoo: How a TV news clip, Insta snaps, a glimpse of a tat and a T-shirt sold on Etsy led FBI to alleged cop car arsonist

Re: Tut....kids today....

We identified him by his rather unique Prince Albert

Bloke rolls up to KFC drive-thru riding horse-drawn cart only to be told: Neigh

Let's clear the fences and not get stuck in the ditch

At Kentucky Fried Colt you cannot bolt to the finish line. At Mad Cow Donald's horses are permitted to be ON the menu and at the drive-thru.

This helps to ensure the Mad'CD's customers in the neigh-borhood have a stable diet. Their straw-poll of customers confirmed it. Nay-question no 4 faults on their part.

What could possibly make a cranky crocodylomorph more terrifying? How about one that chases you on its hind legs?

Pretty obvious really...

If they weren't so quick, big, and bitey we would expect to have seen far more evidence of fossilised handbags.

(Yes don't quibble about the timing of them being around about 100M years before us and many dead by 75M before us) I'm sure the resident aliens would have made handbags instead).

Singapore to distribute wearable contact-tracing device and won't rule out making it compulsory

Care and maintenance

When you receive it remember to ensure it is dry by placing it in the microwave briefly (ideally someone else's).

IBM quits facial recognition because Black Lives Matter

Re: Or...

...it might not improve though as they will have just RA'd everyone in the facial recognition business unit.

Smart fridges are cool, but after a few short years you could be stuck with a big frosty brick in the kitchen

there's a risk hackers could co-opt unpatched fridges...

All your banger are belong to us

Amateur astroboffins spot young brown dwarf playing with planet-forming hula hoop just 102 parsecs from Earth

Somewhat confusing....

>>>

making for a dim object that is tricky for astronomers to observe

<<<

So, as dwarfs go, does this make it Dopey or Bashful?

This'll make you feel old: Uni compsci favourite Pascal hits the big five-oh this year

Re: I remember it in the early 90s

...and even in the 80s - Apple Pascal on my Apple II (an upgrade from my Commodore Pet) - indeed very happy days.

China's Tencent to order ONE MILLION SERVERS as part of $70bn digital infrastructure splurge

What could possibly go wrong....

>>>>

The Shenzhen-based company needs all those servers because on top of WeChat it runs a colossal gaming business, video streaming services and a small-but-growing cloud. To house it all the company recently completed construction of a 51-hectare data centre complex in Guizhou province that will house tens of thousands of servers. The development includes more than 30,000 square meters of tunneling inside a hill,and a bomb shelter guarded by robots.

<<<

1. There is a big freaking pile of excavated mud on the top of a hill. A rare risk situation due to an obscure thing called gravity.

2. Robots with laser guns... 'nuff said.

IBM cuts deep into workforce – even its Watson and AI teams – as it 'pivots' to cloud

Re: Cut loose, foot loose

Funny you should say that. The Risc System/6000 (RS/6000)s were the first systems to use IBM's Power/PowerPC processors. I was product manager for the IBM venture into immersive virtual reality systems in 1995 (yes what is old is new again) using some technology from a company called Virtuality PLC. The IBM graphics bit consisted of a PC card stuffed with 4 of these processors that crunched all the graphics processing on the fly.... Some of the appications were semi-serious business apps/ virtual world demos... some were actually games!

Apple, Google begin to spread pro-privacy, batt-friendly coronavirus contact-tracing API for phone apps

You can pay extra for ad-free versions....

When the ads change from hydroxychloroquine to undertakers you know there is a problem....

ALGOL 60 at 60: The greatest computer language you've never used and grandaddy of the programming family tree

Re: .. never used .. ?

Yes would have been an ICL 1902 or 1903.

I used it on the 1902.

Re: .. never used .. ?

Algol 60 on an ICL 1902 around 1980 here; How many freaking errors did you get because of missing semicolons?;

As for PL/1, IBM also had its own extended versions (confidential for some reason), used for internal mainframe code development, called PL/AS and PL/DS.

p.s. ADA anyone?

The ultimate 4-wheel-drive: How ESA's keeping XMM-Newton alive after 20 years and beyond

Re: That is the frikkin' coolest Satellite/Telescope I have ever seen

...more likely at at a beery Friday night engineers social..."I bet you can't put a huge dildo in orbit and get it past management without them noticing"....

Red Hat’s new CEO on surviving inside Big Blue: 'We don’t participate in IBM's culture. It’s that simple'

Re: IBM

...and the only IBM culture grows in the bottom of the coffee cups that the RA'd left behind.

ATLAS flubbed: Comet heading our way takes one look at Earth, self-destructs into house-sized chunks

Coincidence?

April 6th - Trump signs executive order establishing U.S. policy on the exploitation of off-Earth resources, a couple of weeks later a comet breaks up. I expect an immediate launch of Space Force (now in Supermarionation) armed with picks and shovels. Got to mine it before the Mytsterons get it.

Cloudflare goes retro with COBOL delivery service. Older coders: Who's laughing now? Turns out we're still vital

BEGIN

BEGIN

outstring("ALGOL notably ALGOL 60 International Algebraic Language (IAL) is the common ancestor of all modern programming languages including all the C ones");

outstring("I was programming this when you were but knee-high to a grasshopper");

outstring("Why do you think the f***ing semicolon was invented?");

outstring("SIMULA - 67")

END;

I can't even remember if this would parse correctly - error at line 42

p.s. don't forget Fujitsu Visual Cobol

UK Information Commissioner OKs use of phone data to track coronavirus spread

>>>

Ah well. There's always ankle monitors like for prisoners on supervised release...

<<<

Should be OK in Australia where the early (foreign) settlers were pushed off a ship with a ball and chain attached....

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, health secretary Matt Hancock both test positive for COVID-19 coronavirus

Re: I like the idea of such fellows running their work via Video-Conferencing...

There has never been a time in history where we have so needed Luck and Flaw

Re: The emergency regulations...

>>>

National Police Chiefs' Council, a semi-official police body that decides which laws are enforced and how, this morning endorsed Derbyshire Police checking on people going for walks in empty stretches of the countryside via drone.

<<<

What could possibly go wrong?

Why not add some facial recognition.

The essential part is to have "Sunset clauses"

(and I don't mean spotting people engaged in evening outdoor bonking - with possible arse recognition)

Re: The emergency regulations...

I assume there exceptions for world leaders... like he could meet Trump soon???

Drones, apps and packed lunches: The latest on big tech's COVID-19 response

Drone Version 2

....will have a laser gun - better get granny in the retirement home a tinfoil hat and a Guy Fawkes mask

Stockholders, assemble. HP's latest argument: Do you really trust Xerox to take us over during a pandemic recession?

Re: Cue the jokes!!

The takeover is probably not a good idea... it could lead to more copies of the virus.

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Black hole quasar tsunamis moving at 46 million miles per hour

Re: Mindboggingly fast

I believe that is around 5151989755 furlongs/fortnight

Forget James Bond's super-gadgets, this chap spied for China using SD card dead drops. Now he's behind bars

Re: Stupid

Steganography - plenty of free tools - send it in a bunch of cat pictures

You've duked it out with OS/2 – but how to deal with these troublesome users? Nukem

Re: Timing is off..

Incidentally "Presentation Manager" was mostly coded at IBM Hursley Park in Hampshire, leveraging a lot of programming experience from the IBM/370 Graphical Data Dispaly Manager (GDDM) coupled with the interface work done by Xerox PARC. Some of the other related work was obviously done by Microsoft, a very boutique company at the time... I had to make a trip to IBM Boca Raton to dig into the build & integration methods they (Microsoft) used (basically "we will chill out mostly until the day before the build, then drink extreme amounts of caffeine and code like fuck"), because they were rather alien to IBM at the time.

A bunch of the IBM OS/2 Presentation Manager stuff was folded into Windows NT.

Disk stuck in the drive? Don't dilly-Dali – get IT on the case!

Re: Dwarfs or dwarves?

...but when it comes to that usage, I happen to know that 6 out of 7 Dwarfs are not Happy.

If you're wondering how Brit cops' live suspect-hunting facial-recog is going, it's cruising at 88% false positives

I'm a bank robber and I want to complain!

I'm planning to rob a bank. I need 4 people for the job. I interview a bunch of candidates and come up with a short-list. If this stuff actually worked I could send them past the camera and see who got singled out. Now I could select from the rest knowing that any recognition cameras would likely miss them! Crappy system, I want my money back (so does the bank).

It's only a game: Lara Croft won't save enterprise tech – but Jet Set Willy could

So I guess we can look forward to...

Next generation Genuine People Personalities? Or Artificially Intelligent Sexbots? Or a combination?

>>Outside digital signal processing, where the basic mathematical blocks can be highly refined and reused, FPGAs haven't caught fire.

Please be sure to include a fire extinguisher with the sexbots anyway.

Huawei unfolds latest shot at the phone-tablet hybrid with reinforced hinge and reassuringly Xs-sive price

Ahhh...

The Huawei Termi-Mate-R... "You will soon be"X☠️

"zirconium-based liquid metal alloy"

Run! Run!

Keen to check for 'abnormal' user behaviours? Microsoft talks insider risk, AWS imports and compliance at infosec shindig RSA

here we go again...

>> the exciting "Offensive language in email."

Poor Mrs. Babcock in accounting will be calling IT support again...

I'm sorry, Elon. I'm afraid I can't do that... SpaceX touts robo-rides for orbital vacations, lift-off in 2021-ish

Hmmmmm....

Hopefully it's not sub-leased to Hotblack Dessiato.

>>>This will provide up to four individuals with the opportunity...

AKA guinea pigs.

p.s. don't forget to take a towel

Researchers trick Tesla into massively breaking the speed limit by sticking a 2-inch piece of electrical tape on a sign

Tesla racing?

What if I tape a "1" in front of it...?

It is with a heavy heart we must inform you, once again, folks are accidentally spilling thousands of sensitive pics, records onto the internet

Re: Personal Data Security

...depends on the data involved....

Bank credit card data = meh, bank will cancel the transaction and reimburse me, send me a new card.

Dodgy dating site the wife doesn't know about (I will cite the breached list of registered emails from Ashley Madison - just the email address field mind you) - holy ****!!!!

Name and address from the adult mental health and addictions clinic site - ughh!!!

Crypto-upstart subpoenas Glassdoor to unmask ex-staff believed to be behind negative reviews. EFF joins the fray

Acting to type...

"In both Norwegian and Swedish Kraken is the definite form of krake, a word designating an unhealthy animal or something twisted" a legendary cephalopod-like sea monster of gigantic size.

Maybe they should rebrand as Calamari - sounds more palatable, just need to change the behavior then. Hint, don't take your severance in the cryptocurrency.

MWC now stands for 'Most Won't Come': Intel, Vivo and MediaTek drop out of mobile industry kneesup over coronavirus

So... RSA?

So Spain has 0 cases when I last looked, and California has 7 - should people be bailing on the huge upcoming RSA in San Fran? OK I guess attendees are well placed to do a Risk Assessment....

Meet Clippy 9000: Microsoft brags about building Earth's largest AI language model, refuses to let it out of the lab

17 billion parameters later...

My hovercraft is full of eels

Google Chrome to block file downloads – from .exe to .txt – over HTTP by default this year. And we're OK with this

Re: Release 100....

You have obviously not used a Japanese Smart-Toilet

Be careful it may also have an IPee Camera