* Posts by Destroy All Monsters

16005 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2008

Intel brings bigger guns to AMD server chip war

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Childcatcher

Correction M'lord!

"Back in the early 2000s, Intel was trying to protect its high-end 64-bit Itanium server business and push its Xeon processors down"

Shouldn't that be "was starting to milk its high-end 64 bit Itanium in the corporate sector, expanding it with FUD, empty promises and dumb hype via press articles against MIPS and Alpha while pushing its overheating, slow-as-hell NetBurst-based crap to the 32-bit unwashed masses"

I still can remember the tremendous propellers on the motherboards.

Year of the cloud? Not until it can shield world's Mitnicks

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But how do you avoid the flash-memory based cameras?

Brit pair deported from US for 'destroy America' tweet

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Coat

#anallyDestroyAmerica

Why the h8 against the whole hemisphere? Shouldn't the tweets be directed only against the gringos and yanks?

Met Office cuts off Linux users with new weather widgets

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You are not going to emit whines about writing two additional lines of Perl, are you?

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Meh

They are "profit-oriented"

"to recoup that they need to 'pander' to the most common platforms to see a reasonable ROI."

Someone doing profit/loss calculations at a government outfit?

Please clarify.

First US CTO Aneesh Chopra resigns from post

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Big Brother

"his work have helped advance open government."

I suppose you can now check your medical records from inside the Gitmo Concentration Camp.

Dumb salesmen are hurting us – Nokia CEO

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Devil

That's because...

...this article actually makes sense.

Boffin's blog blast births boycott of publisher Elsevier

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Big Brother

"because Elsevier holds the copyright"

Which effectively terminates the market, replacing it by monopoly enforced by the guns of the state. The legislation for THAT being maintained and extended through stuffed envelopes handed to lawmakers.

Copyright - not being used to remunerate the crying creative people or sadfrog writers in the El Reg Copyright Defense Corner.

But it's usual practice. Even the IEEE and ACM rape and pillage, and they really should know better: http://www.crypto.com/blog/copywrongs/

Students busted for hacking computers, changing grades

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Thumb Up

They seem perfectly well adapted to real life

Not to the bromide retardo make-believe bullcrap for Delta-Minus Semi-Morons one gets force-fed in highschool.

> when another student heard of the offer and snitched to the school principal.

A candidate for concrete foot appears!

Polish lawmakers don Guy Fawkes masks to protest ACTA

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Pirate

Yes

That's where the "copyright protected" parting shot comes in.

Planet-hunting Kepler hits EXOPLANET JACKPOT

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Pirate

I am really amazed that these planetary systems are stable, I suppose interstellar space will be full of roundish crap ejected from solar systems Auf Nimmerwiedersehn!

Perfect for a hidden interstellar pirate base! Yarrhhh!

Newt Gingrich wants Moon to be 51st US state

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Facepalm

Newt verbal flatulence is a fearful thing!

"Northwest Ordinance for Space"

When I was a little kid, I had grandiose plans for SPACE STATIONS! In SPAAACE! I had already chosen the exact color scheme in which I would have them painted. The rest was details. That was long ago.

Google Maps to dish out disaster alerts

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Meh

This moralfagging is tiresome

"suppress its natural instincts and do something for the common good"

It makes some people rich and brings search results. Also amazing maps, streetview and peppers you with ads. Not good enough? Not happy? Don't use it.

Jesus Christ what's wrong with people?

Super-powered 'frankenmalware' strains detected in the wild

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Meh

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_War

I think it is extremely unlikely that successful hybrids will be created accidentally. This is not a large physically grounded system with high parallelism. Here, we have a few thousands computers in which "hybridized code" implies higher success at crashing & burning, not at hiding, surviving and infecting.

As to why anyone would develop such a thing knowingly ... beats me. Why not just pack everything into a known correct package?

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Thumb Up

"the time of the Jerusalem virus"

Jesus as Patient Zero of a new replicator meme complex?

Node.js sees Windows compatibility as key to success

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Facepalm

The dismay

Why JavaScript? WHY? What is interesting about that language in 2012??

For some historical reason it shows up in webpages. It has also been standardized as ECMAScript. It uses { and }.

So. Fracking. What.

US govt security advice site trashed by hackers

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Stop

>>If it was as low as 5% then I don't think they industry could say they were losing billions.

Ridiculous. If it was as low as 0.01% then "the industry" would say they were losing billions. This has been ongoing since the invention of "home taping".

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Angel

LOL!

Why U mad though?

How to tell if your biz will do a Kodak

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Facepalm

This is not how it works.

"it's just a case of vision"

Say what? It is impossible to know whether your latest attempt at "innovation" will go anywhere. If you could just decide to "innovate" and win thereby, it would be easy.

Let's take this optical storage thing. Definitely innovate, but it didn't go anywhere. This is not necessarily due to bad positioning as the article implies. It may be just due to bad luck, bad timing, bad technological approaches, bad marketing or even government red tape & taxes. Tomorrow a tentacle of HP may come out with something similar and win big.

I like the clarity of hindsight but one should not be fooled into thinking that it allows one to take the next step, however small.

Russia and NASA plan to COLONISE the Moon

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FAIL

So is the War on Galactic Terror called off?

The 19 trillion actual debt paid?

The 200 trillion uncovered welfare costs suddenly covered?

No?

Forget this shit.

NASA close to approving first sci-fi flick shot in space

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Thumb Up

Will there be...

....finally a realistic depiction of an "accident in an airlock"? Last one was in that Kubrick film with the IBM computer that went nuts, IIRC.

Feds: Apple, Google, Adobe, Intel, Pixar had wage-fixing no-poach pact

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Problem? I think not.

> The issue is that they agreed to not hire employees who wanted to leave where they were, and applied for a job at the other company all on their own.

Considering that the world's employers does not consist only of these companies, I fail to see how any of that is a problem.

The only things that happens is that really good people will be hired out or leave the pool formed by the "gentlemen's club" companies [preferably going abroad where one can give the finger to any agreement not to use the part of your brain used in one's former job, too].

Or one can open one's own company.

Additionally, note that new entrants to that pool will be more expensive once the fact of the club is known.

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Thumb Down

> Rigging the market (whichever type of market we are talking about) is not "civilised behaviour"

> Probably supports labor unions

German court shoots down patent gripe against Apple

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FAIL

"LOL I TROLL U"

NASA shuts off Voyager 1's central heating

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Headmaster

Erm?

I fear you don't get what the problem is here.

MIT boffins devise faster Fast Fourier transform

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Boffin

Fuzzy Fourier Transform?

El Reg, do NOT be afraid of using Big Words like "time domain" and "frequency domain".

We can take it it!

Feds cuff coder accused of US bank source code swipe

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Trollface

No this program?

for (;;) {

$accountBalance += $irs->extortMoneyAtGunpoint($taxRate) unless $deathDidDie;

$accountBalance += $treasury->sellGovtBondsToHoiPolloi();

if (log(-$accountBalance) > 12) {

$fed->printRandomAmountOfMoney();

$accountBalance += $treasury->sellGovtBondsToFedVia($goldmanSachs);

damageControlVia(@spinmeisters)

}

do {

$accountBalance -= $congress->welfareWarfareSpending($exelSheet,$blackExcelSheet);

} while !moneyLustSatiated();

elect(); elect();

$taxRate *= 1.1;

$situation->update($taxRate,$accountBalance)

throw FinancialException if $situation->isZimbabwe()

}

Two PROTECT IP sponsors drop support for their own bill

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Flame

"Stealing content is theft, plain and simple"

Holy cancerigenic tautology Batman!!!

George Lucas: 'No more Star Wars'

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Facepalm

Are you hired by some PR agency?

"Lucas is a power house of talent that can take single credit for resurrecting the US film industry in the late 70's."

What the hell does that even mean?

"Before you criticize the man, walk a mile in his shoes and see how successful you would be"

Am I doing movies? No.

"He has earned the right to walk away from the brilliant world he created"

HE MADE MOVIES!

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Thumb Up

RedLetterMedia citation

A guy called William Shakesman once said:

'Brevity is the Soul of Wit.'

It means stop wasting my time. You keep it nice and simple.

[Shows Lucas inspecting a large set of Star Wars figurines of Goonghas etc.]

I said STOP IT!

Data centers to cut LAN cord?

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Devil

Why? Economics.

As the paper says:

"In prior work, we argued ... for a more modest addition of links to relieve hotspots and boost application performance. The links, called flyways, add extra capacity to the base network

to alleviate hotspots. When the traffic matrix is sparse (i.e. only a few ToR switches are hot), a small number of flyways can significantly improve performance, without the cost of building a fully non-oversubscribed network. ... We believe that 60 GHz flyways are an attractive choice because wireless devices simplify DC upgrades, as no wiring changes are needed. Furthermore, 60 GHz technology is likely to become inexpensive as it is commoditized by

consumer applications, while optical switches are not. ... indoor 60 GHz technologies such as 802.11ad target a short range of 10 meters, and 60 GHz links use highly directional antennas.*

Sounds interesting. But why not go for the comm laser?

Plan hatched to view Milky Way's black hole heart

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Holmes

"the team is looking for the ring of matter that forms around the perimeter of the structure"

I would say calling an 4-D "finger from the future" that is literally the edge of spacetime a "structure" is playing fast and loose with language.

Anyways. Greg Egan used the ominous-sounding name "Goudal-e-Markaz" for this ... place ... in his novel "Incandescence". This is evidently Persian, if anyone knows what it means, please translate.

McDonald's punters offered sex in exchange for Chicken McNuggets

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Megaphone

No but I wish the moderatrix were back.

Enterprise IT's power shift threatens server-huggers

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Trollface

This is the road to hell

User thinking they will get "what they want" by pushing into the cloud is like left-leaners thinking they will get more "equality" by pushing for bigger government.

Excuse me while I fix up this script.

Wikipedia to shut down Wednesday in SOPA protest

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Mushroom

It's a good for a representative to despise and misinform the public.

Hopefully this goes so totally under that a few of the Capitol Roaches will metaphorically dance from high branches, otherwise our EUROTARDS will fall over themselves trying to emulate this and play Chihuaha to Big Obama and the rest of the one-party system.

After all, they are already about to nuke the eureconomy [what remains of it anyway] by barring Iranian oil. What for? To have their bellies fondled in a game of pure US-internal one-upmanship.

Flash drive meltdown fingered in Swedish IT blackout

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Could it be the SSD was running in a RAID 1 and both sides went away at the same time?

Relevant: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/05/the-hot-crazy-solid-state-drive-scale.html

Busted Phobos-Grunt in harmless splashdown

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Boffin

Well no.

You are NOT following a geodesic through spacetime when you are carried along by the ocean bed.

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Holmes

Wasn't there a rumor that it actually went down in the Andes, and some worry about the local indian family that found the RTG Pu pallets and is now using these to keep warm at night?

Murdoch slams White House over SOPA in Twitter row

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Devil

Why yes!

Present consists in pieces of coal accelerated to several hundred meters per second for good measure.

Flash stalks Seagate's hybrid drives

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Windows

Like driving without safety belts

I guess an OS-supported infrastructure to detect that an SSD is a burnout and to automatically "eject it safely" and reconfigure to the harddisk instead of taking the whole machine down with it would be useful.

I would generate some interesting "BONG!" alerts.

Ten... stars of the Consumer Electronics Show

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Paris Hilton

Ok, it's bad but...

The alternative is scantily clad presentation bunnies of asian descent just barely not showing pubes.

Do we want that?

Sources suggest new FTC antitrust focus on Google+

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Big Brother

Someone hasn't paid enough campaign contributions yet.

It's election year, ya know?

US military access cards cracked by Chinese hackers

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Mushroom

John Brunner hadn't seen anything

"It all comes down to money".

SNORT!

To hear this when 700 billion USD per annum are blown on the *official* flecktarned reichcircus alone [tendency: going UP] is unbelievable.

The hallowed military of the democratic welfare/warfare state is now just about feeding revenues to be seized from the populace *in the future* to arbitrary companies *now* depending on how much their lobbyists have been working the Central Palace Corridors. That some people in foreign lands get turned into metal-peppered steak, cripples or anatomical displays in torture cellars is totally ancillary and actually meaningless. This can be easily seen in that no political result or success whatsoever has been obtained in the last 20 years. Indeed, things are just getting started on the downhill slope with no politician (no politician not considered "extreme" or "on the fringe" or "unelectable") pulling the handbrake.

Guess the few shavings for the good people of Microsoft are just natural.

UK student faces extradition to US after piracy case ruling

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Big Brother

http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/2012/01/varieties-of-pissing.html

"In the parlance of the day, or what would be that parlance if we spoke more plainly, we can say with accuracy and precision: The ruling class of the United States pisses on the entire world, just as it pisses on every human being who is not favored by privilege and power. This is the ultimate foundation of our lives today. This is the truth that will almost never be spoken."

Oz skeptic offers prize if Rossi’s E-cat works

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Holmes

Nah

That happens about every 5 years. It happen in '92 too with compression below the theoretical minimum, but I can't find the "ZOMG GREAT" and "LOL SCEPTICAL" articles from Byte back...

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Holmes

Well, it *is* Lubos. If he isn't doing defending String Theory by Vociferous Attack or commenting on politics, you should be able to trust him.

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Holmes

> lot of 'science' suffers from the same human failing of dogmatic belief that religion has

This B.S. is repeatedly professed as truth by "soft" science academics, "truthers" and people how think that math has been invented by The Man to put down the peasants. But it's just not true. You may have to *wait* thirty years for attitudes to be reoriented until the egos occupying the ivory tower have died, but compare this to the 4000+ years that humanity has been plagued by abrahamic religions.

> dismissed as crank theory

> e.g plants having sexuality

WAHT!

> relativity vs Newtonian mechanics

history shows that it wasn't dismissed as "cranky" AT ALL, indeed it gave a fresh look at the problems that others tried to crack with unwieldy and bizarre ideas given EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE. Hard-core Newtonians weren't happy. They were wrong.

> quantum vs classical physics

history shows that it wasn't dismissed as "cranky" AT ALL, indeed it gave a fresh look at the problems that others tried to crack with unwieldy and bizarre ideas given EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE. Hard-core Classicists (like Einstein) weren't happy. They were wrong.

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Devil

"Damn I lost my singularity, it fell through the floor."

> I don't think a device that gives out free energy would take off much up in Mullumbimby

OTOH, a device that produces Copper from Nickel would probably blow up much of Mullumbimby.

Apple, Amazon and Google take lazy punters hostage

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Holmes

Not sure what is being said here...

"Monopolies" illegal? Since when? That's what "Intellectual Property" is all about.

The ones where "Antitrust" is involved are mainly about The Need For Taxes or a Friendly Ear for the Competitor, really. Or about bureaucrats trying palliative measures for problems that "Intellectual Property" legislation has created in the first place. Great job.

Now, we got that out of the way...

"But it's clear that in an increasingly digitised world, the delivery mechanism is the big key to creating value and maximising financial returns."

Thank you for the marketing shop boilerplate. But wasn't this always so? A mall creates value because it functions as a convenient delivery mechanism with all-in-one shopping, something that the corner shop cannot deliver. Amazon creates value - whether it delivers digital media or paper media - but offering nearly anything in a controllable manner, something that the corner bookstore cannot deliver. (Anyone who tried to order a book back in the 80s based on ISBN knows how abysmally unreliable bookstores were in delivering the goods.) This is why they die out or why to need to cater to the "non-connected" people or the book-browsing crowd (but then again, when you browse, the person behind the counter will look at you askance. Do I need this? Hell no.)

Hey, more books are being sold, "content creators" have the chance to reach more people and sell more stuff, it's great.

There is only one problem with above: lock-in DRMed formats and arbitary control by the distributor even after the purchase was made. Why is this even possible? Look under "Intellectual Property Legislation". Then be less slothful and go to somewhat shady sites where scans and PDFs can be had free of charge. In the latter case, only I win or maybe the "unauthorized reseller", but hey, the marketplace is not a controlled environment.

Nuclear Mars tank thrusts hard into perfect position

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FAIL

Could not find anything under "Faith". Did you mean "Fail"?

You just need to have about 2 years of engineering on your résumé to learn that designing and building an artifact doing stuff in the real world is fraught with risk because nature WILL confront you with configuration spaces larger than you imagined and exhibit the FRANKLY DISTURBING tendency to change the state of your artifact from a controlled region to one of the VASTLY LARGER regions next to it, with those regions labelled "here be failure", "don't go here" and "your wife just left you", and this RANDOMLY and EXPONENTIALLY MORE FREQUENTLY the more complex your artifact is.