Posts by Destroy All Monsters

"None of them actually charge for the browser? It's free!"

...and more retarded comments from the economically clueless.

Sometimes I fear that I understand people who grab UZIs and go postal.

Anyways, the actual issue is about "standards" here - seems that this somehow was distilled into the browser/mediaplayer brouhaha, covering up the real problem.

As long as Microsoft is not forced to open up its protocol its file format descriptions FREE OF CHARGE AND WITH NO PATENT OR COPYRIGHT RESTRICTIONS WHATSOVER TO ANYONE in a well-documented fashion, allows independent implementation of the same by third parties and refrains from abusing its market position by subverting standardization commitees (see the MS ODF farce) and by extending and embracing or maybe just "interpreting" existing protocols ("this page optimized for IE") -- we are not getting anywhere.

Once that happens, MS should be able to ship anything it wants with its OS as competition will again be about performance and feature set and not warped due to legal lock-out by an arbitrary monopoly. "Play nice or not at all" has been an accusation leveled at MS since at least 1998.

And "opening up" does not mean being able to see MS source code under an NDA so that one has to reverse-engineer whatever Redmond pumps out only to find that an implementation is covered by some MS patent as it actually involves a kludgy mapping from XML to an MS-extended version of ASN.1 or something.

This stimulus sounds fishy

In this comment section: people who complain that "it's not made in America" but are not ready to shell out 500 USD for that small ADSL router either. Sounds like spoiled brats.

Also, how exactly are 7 billion of taxpayer dollars vectored onto "broadband" going to create jobs, or at least long-term jobs?

Instead of a lion...

...they should have used a boar named Napoleon. That would fit nicely.

OMG! Grody to the max!

Don't say these machines do not currently have integrity checks on their installed software?

Probably one of those ATM series running "Windows for ATMs" which can sometimes be spied when BSOD or impromptu menu bar show up.

Due diligence? High assurance? We have heard of it.

Lawyers please.

In before "blowjob" headline suggestion

A comment is required, in addition to a title.

"We have an independent third-party monitoring procedure in place"

Yeah, it's in this rather biggish room with lots of cable going to it and a sign that says "No entry - NSA only"

Damn kids!

Anyway, "MOAR BOAR WANTS MOAR"

Freiwillig gezwungen

"When Minchin responded that he never heard of a voluntary mandatory system"

Well then, history teaches that voluntary mandatory systems are old hat in any regime that has moved a bit strongly towards the red/brown side of things and that starts demanding citizens' support for freewheeling "popular" initiatives for which it doesn't even to bother writing down laws any more.

Yeah I still have a RAMBUS Module...

...from an Intel motherboard from the early noughties. Also, I remember a gushing article in The Economist ("Rambo RAMBUS" was it?). Apart from that, RAMBUS only evokes massive FAIL for me. Do I care about that company or its products? This would be like caring about "Scooter" Libby. Would make me feel unclean.

Ahhh..... I feel younger again

It's like it's the golden times again --- before the dot.com crash and the endless War On Stuff bullshit; back when I learnt about Apache config files using a book not bought online and hacked servlet code in vi -- and when using IIS was considered a honour badge of FAIL.

Happy times...

Where is the nostalgia icon? Paris will have to do.

Of course...

...we need orbital shipyards to so that cylons/romulans can do surprise attacks on them.

Go for it!

SO CAN WE DRINK A LITER OF COFFEE PER DAY OR NOT?

Clearly that's the only IT angle that matters.

Not a problem....

...we already know that high-assurance software can be had on the market for specialized tasks on specialized hardware (but may still exhibit 'bugs' or 'working as designed' flaws during their operational lifetime). Contracts for that kind of software do not start below several million dollars _per customer_ and insurance companies / the lawyer sweat tanks demand a cut. Wanna pay out of your spare personal income? Be my guest.

>> Would we accept those sort of terms and conditions for our cars, airplane, and critical medical equipment.

Because people own critical medical equipment and airplanes. Cars are high-volume but I hear the software in there is like sausage and currently moving in the wrong engineering direction of complexification and microsoftation.

@Matt: That's the point, right?

>> but the stress of keeping close formations will increase their tiredness unless DARPA can also develop much better autopilots with a pre-configured "goose" mode

Welcome to the 21st century. We have cybernetics that can do things that a pilot would be unable to. Actually that was the case in the 20th century already.

Now we just need to integrate that dog into the Hornet's cockpit to keep the flyboy's fingers from the controls.

Hahaha!

So who's betting that in the end the police decides to return the disks but they suddenly cannot be found anywhere. Lost? Destroyed? Reused by the BOFH because they erroneously appeared on his inventory list? Oh well...

We need a "proud eagle" icon, because .... Fatherland!

So what do the Germans say?

Do they have anything similar? They often act as nice canaries because once such dubious laws are enacted, busybody lawyers set up non-profit organizations and send off letters to providers warning them that they are breaking the law and demand 5'000 EUR for the act of letter-writing.

Anyway, cookie panic is as 90's as John Travolta.

The view as seen from inside the Empire...

...must be truly glorious.

Do I hear music? Either something is burning or it's the world's smallest violin. I still don't know which.

No U!

>> And these are just rock / ice etc, they do not emit any form of radiation and reflect light very poorly.

Uh... no. And we have syntactic devices to scan a large number of long-exposure photographs, you know.

>> Thinking we can detect 99% of these, or that we can detect rocks as small as 300m at all with an advance warning of more than hours or maybe a couple of days is ridiculous

Uh... no. These things pass a number of times nearby, generally, so will most probably be spotted a hundred years in advance.

>> These things come in at cosmic speeds, thousands of Km/sec,

Uh...... no. That would be interstellar super asteroids.

Three strikes and you are out?

More languages!

>> The SAPPEUR language destroys unneeded data structures as quickly as possible, thereby saving energy

Teh. Destroying information actually generates heat. Just leave those bits where they are...

But seriously, SAPPEUR is actually being deployed? It apparently allocates mucho stuff on the stack; you know what happens to your real-time algorithms if your stack grows quickly. I remember something about an ESA SWENG rule saying "no dynamic data structures in high-assurance real-time programs" (not that I have every written any of those) and "no C++ either".

Also,

"Reference Counting is real­time capable (as opposed to garbage collection)"

Uh... yeah. But there is a very good a reason why mark & sweep garbage collection exists, as opposed to vanilla reference counting garbage collection, right?

I foresee a fight...

...between the author and our esteemed moderatrice.

Still, it's funny how >25 years after "keeping recipes" was mentioned as a good reason to get a Z80-based computer, they they still turn up in marketing material.

Hm!

>> CO2 emissions seem to be at their lowest for 500 million years (that's 500,000,000 years).

You forgot top say "into an atmosphere with free O2". Formerly, there used to be an atmosphere composed mainly of CO2, I would think

It is not a good idea...

...to piss off people which might suddenly have the ability to throw traversable wormhole mouths at your parliament.

"Yes, an unfortunate accident. Very tragic, the cause being due to the misalignment of the detector magnets. Now, about those funding proposals..."

OH YEAH?

"And it's worth noting that the New York Times doesn't give anyone and their brother the freedom to rig stories towards their particular point of view - or post fake quotes to its web page."

Maybe not "anyone and their brother" nor to "web pages" but if it's politically expedient to stoke the fire for a hit job on the Middle East by inventing Iraqi WMD from whole cloth and "anonymous well-informed sources" - GO FOR IT, JUDITH!

A NYT article seems to demand as much salt as a Wikipedia article when being consumed.

Far easier...

Take the command levers out of Greenspan et al's hand (also, sew their mouth shut so that retarded statements about "rational exhuberance" and "no bubble in the housing market" etc. are no longer on the airwaves), scrap the paper money printing presses and demand that banks no longer be able to leverage their deposits like there's no tomorrow and voilà -- about 98% of the problem of financial instability should be solved.

US as always set on permanent fear/panic/czar cycle.

That reminds me. What happened to the bizarre story about the Ivins guy from the military research lab apparently solely responsible for the Anthrax Event who conveniently suicided himself all of a sudden? The FBI has everything under control on that front, does it?

Maybe it makes a technical contribution...

...but it's pretty obvious, really and has been done for ages if you replace "mobile phone" by "any electronic device with a CPU".

Next: patent on toilet paper being used on BOTH SIDES IN THE SAME SESSION.

"IT?" logo because "where is IT heading" (why, to China of course; Eucorpse will keep them lawyers)

Chriswell predicts

"If Itanium wants to outlive Power, what Intel and HP really need to pray for is that the x64 chip takes away all those game console deals from Big Blue. They need embedded x64 chips, like the Atom, to take off as an alternative to embedded PowerPC chips, too. IBM better stop and tie its sneakers if it wants to outrun that grizzly."

Huh? Game consoles do not hit me as an that important to an architecture that is commonly used in the automotive industry for example. That Grizzly is a bit pear-shaped and the probability that it will reach Itanium before Power even feels the body heat is about 1. We need some numbers here though.

100 billion USD....

...is about a 30th of the Iraq war unofficial total.

And that's before the coming hyperinflation due to overheating printing presses.

Big whoop.

facepalm.jpg

Ego wars? In my Browser?

Oh well...

"Android Data"

Ding Dong, it's not Jehova's witnesses this time, its Paramount lawyers at the door, baby.

...or whatever outfit owns Star Drek these days. They want their Data back.

facepalm.jpg

"Travis Rowland, 24, ... is sympathetic to Mooney's situation because he once worked in military intelligence"

One half-baked twat chasing another, Benny Hill style.

Nice...

I think Oefelein is a pretty cool guy. eh flies space shuttles, rises wimmin and doesn't afraid of anything.

The red panda is also called "firefox", apparently.

So we have our IT angle,

Moreover, I misread

"Needless to say, the allied scientists plan more detailed research."

as

"Needless to say, the alien scientists plan more detailed research."

The scientific question of what's wrong with me is evident.

"One land, one globe and one species"

Freddy Mercury!!

inertioid = "forward or rotary motion without physical reaction"

The rotary motion is no problem. That's how an astronaut can turn his body in orbit without touching the walls. Forward motion... not likely. Is this a "reactionless drive" or something? Expect New Scientist to run a cover story which then has to be painstakingly shot down by people who have actual understanding of differential equations and error bars.

I seem to using the Flame Icon a lot. Maybe it's just me.

Wall Street Journal?

SNORT!

@Good Engineering

"MS a much better safe language (.Net)."

Care to develop? You are not talking C#, are you? Eiffel on .Net maybe?

Retarded comment is retarded

>> If you legalise cannabis, would the dealers really decide that they no longer want to make money from crime and give up rather than moving on to dealing harder drugs (or taking up an alternative type of crime) to continue making money?

Because "dealers" are nefarious never-do-wells that, once the economic basis on which they primarily subsist has been removed, are bound to re-skill to more dangerous illegal activities, like dealing harder and harder drugs, dealing in weapons, women and illegal immigrants or maybe going into politics (which begs the question of whether there are re-employment programs for dealers put out of business by changes in government policies)

Not enough really

With the upcoming deeper involvement in the newly named "Af-Pak" war -- which might well end in the second nuclear exchange in history -- and the next 8-year installment of the Great Game for the 'tans oil reserves coming up, the US just has to delete as much as possible of their overly expensive tech really only useful to fight an interstellar invasion. They have ignored economics long enough.

What Roger Waters said

We cower in our shelters

With our hands over our ears

Lloyd Webber's awful stuff

Runs for years and years and years...

An earthquake hits the theatre!

But the operetta lingers

The the piano lid comes down

And breaks his fracking fingers

...It's a miracle.

Wallace and Gromit are coding

"Then, in his spare time, one developer ported the code to Scala. According to Payne, the Scala queue could process the same message backlog in 20 seconds."

This doesn't compute at all. These guys must have lots of spare time and either horrible code (or maybe almost no code) as well as spare testing environments lying around. Amazing.

Math made me do it!

"Many students choose degrees different to those they preferred – and in which they would be really good in many cases – in order to avoid studying subjects connected with Mathematics."

An economist would say that they actually chose degress that they preferred as having some math in the curriculum actually lowered the preference ranking of the other degrees. So be it. Enjoy your toothless sociology.

Get Some, Grannie!

>> Her case is weak, since almost every court in the land understands what a reasonable response to a purse-snatching is; and it certainly doesn't include lethal force.

Guess it is waving at the retreating robber with an umbrella. Some people have more style, it seems.

When worlds collide

To counter the "impact the prevalence of sexualised images has on young people"

using a "resident psychologist at the Cosmopolitan"

...

What's the stage beyond facepalm?

What the...

And I thought 8 billion USD for Sun was thought cheap by industry observers? What exactly made HP + Oracle think they could get a fast snuff action with little cash there?

Bend over country

"All of the parents and students knuckled under and got re-educated. Except for the three mothers who filed the lawsuit on Monday on behalf of their minor daughters."

The mind boggles. These "parents" must have lost all compass directions about the real world and think they are in some kind of dictatorship where Persons of State are to be unconditionally obeyed. Wonder why americans need guns when they can't even muster the rage to rough the DA up a bit when he visits.

Call the Waahhaaambulance!

"This would help avoid biases toward one technology over another, and expand the opportunities for innovation"

Yes indeed, I feel the pain. What _would_ be acceptable were, of course, biases towards half-baked technologies and "extended" implementations oozing out of Redmond Central. We get the idea.

Still, it is a Strange New World in which "manifestos", which generally consist of etheral spirits collected over cooling towers, lead to premature bitching and moaning in public about exclusionary practices. The glint in upper management's eyes must be positively TREMENDOUS.

Mine's the fluffy one, lying on the floor.