* Posts by Destroy All Monsters

16005 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2008

Profs design AK47-locating 'smart dust' helmets

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At at the origin of the AK clatter...

...there will be Captain America, souvenir-hunting.

LibDems want gov action on killer lorries of death

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Alert

A better idea...

Put up traffic sign saying "If you are here due to your satnav, you might be fugged" at the required spots of doom.

German Mickey Mouse radio snoops on cops

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Will somebody think of the children!

Now kids will find out that Polizei discuss important matter like whether anyone bought a bunch of "Berliner" for today over analog radio. Shocking.

Obama CIO's 'youthful indiscretion': shirt thieving

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WHY IS THIS NEWS!

We are used to having the US presidents and their assorted court jesters and sycophants doing one or several of the following:

0) Criminally inflaming patriotic jingoism out of pure stupidity

1) Mass murder on a colossal scale because they just feel like it (last one did for at least 1'000'000 sand denizens I hear; counter still going up)

2) Destruction of public property on a colossal scale (small fish start at 30'000 USD per US citizen of cash burnt)

3) Creation of economic instability of enormous proportions (bubbles, inflation and the whole shebang)

4) Nepotism that make Nero blush (small fish start at several hundred billion USD)

5) Fomenting wars and right-wing takeovers in faraway countries that are not even on a US-centric map (latest is something called "Georgia"; whatever it is, anyone in there soon will be dead)

6) Generally behaving like they need .45 Aspirin

SO WHO CARES ABOUT THE SHIRTS!

Ethernet — a networking protocol name for the ages

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Boffin

@Doug Bostrom

"How did Metcalfe and crew settle on such a crappy connector?"

Too young to have seen the connectors in use before 8P8C? Have a gander:

Old times: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10BASE2

Faster but trickier: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TIA/EIA-568-B

Rogue international ‘M&A advisors’ target Brit ISP customers

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Alert

How do I nanny state?

>> They clearly don't have any desire to actually track down those responsible.

They are waiting for you to go to the local police station and make a complaint. Or just get a lawyer on the phone and get the ball rolling.

Illinois restores Pluto's planetary status

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Fire all the elected 'tards who spent more than 1 second on this asshattery.

NOW. FIRE THEM.

Better representatives are standing in line and are eager to get a free seat.

Web maven gives convicted botmaster keys to new kingdom

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Happy

You make your decisions and you take your chances.

After all, whole nations reelect hardened criminals as the chief of their executive with the "background check" open to anyone who can open a newspaper. This can lead to interesting discussions but no hard conclusions. Thus Shrug.

The Sun shines out of certified Java programmers

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Happy

@AC: You, my dear, will be out of job presto

"untrained staff are less likely to piss around with pointless, bloated eye candy than those who actually know what people want."

One more free place for trained professionals.

Sun loses Apache and Spring vote on latest Enterprise Java

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Christ Jesus @ joe

"If you didn't try to fragment the JVM world Sun would be more approachable."

Stop talking outta your nether regions and stop calling for abject obeisance and communist party style votes.If they have a beef with Sun's political or technical agenda, they can say so.

"On another note, stop biting the hand that feeds, morons!"

Because they are sponsoring the servers: http://www.apache.org/foundation/thanks.html

Taiwan suggests suffering IT vendors try China, Africa and India

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Global "credit crisis" ... muah

Still clutching at the "credit crisis" straw? After all the printing/pumping of fresh money into anything that looks sickly and with interest rates going down to zero (aka. "economic suicide"), claiming this is a "credit crisis" is like claiming your patient, passing out from blood loss, is probably suffering kind of poisoning and might be in need of leeches. To me it looks like an "amortisation crisis", with the right-hand side of the balance sheets all going into the red zone (leaving only debt) simply because most of the goodies we pretended to have on our left-hand side of the balance sheets turned out to be actually wortheless.

But yeah, I suspect that when this is over, Western IT might have to deal with manuals in Mandarin instead of the other way round.

Obama releases Dubya's secret anti-terror memos

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So, will these so-called lawyers get hung by their balls?

As expected and as seen time and again in history, a diarrhea of meaningless legalese is being used to justify whatever power upwardly mobile sociopaths deem just and proper to arrogate themselves. I'm sadly afraid one cannot hope for some Dubya-style Texan Terminal Justice for these "legal experts", but a cushy post at the American Enterprise Institute or a professorship at UC Berkeley cannot be considered just punishment.

Neil Young posts angry YouTube missive

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Happy

Waaahambulance is where?

Yes, and we know what "wireless" is. We've been watching Battlestar Galactica. So there.

Snacker discovers Nokia phone in crisp packet

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Facepalm

"all crisp bags with the same brand and expiration date would be pulled from its shelves"

Because the other two supervisors also lost their phones at the same exact moment.

Waiting for the activation of ambulance-chasing lawyers to liberate a few million USD because of "irreparable psychological harm" to the end consumer.

Oz runs Romero-themed zombie awareness week

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Dead Vulture

Oh no, boring hackers...

...I was hoping for a poster session on never-ending, quasi recursive, bank bailouts. Oh well.

Reg tombstone, because you never know what might lie beneath.

Intel: We'll spend our way out of the downturn - again

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Dead Vulture

Zweckoptimismus

"He said it was important for companies to continue to spend on R&D and upgrade plant so that they are positioned to take advantage of the upturn when it does come."

Only if you have enough capital stashed away (which is wise) to "upgrade plant" while the customer is staying away, waiting for better times. If this is not the case, you may well turn up on the auction block while the recession is still going on.

Obama chopper plans leaked on file-sharing nets

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Black Helicopters

Ha Ha I can has Secret Blueprints!

>> Hum ... now where did I save the Nuke warhead blueprints? Better ring up the server in Tehran to track down where my files are stored.

You are late to the party. Well-informed rumor has it that the nuke crap has already been sold off to at least Turkey by a level "really not too far below POTUS" for quick cash & hookers from the Clinton administration onwards.

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A cunning plan!

Iran, China and the Soviets, sorry I mean Russia, will now be unable to resist building a copy of the hardware. Considering the price tag attached to it, this is likely to suck up all their military monies and THEN WE WIN FOREVAR.

Convicted Romanian hacker is hot commodity in Italy

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"Security" outfits want to hire hax0r, coz he's "da best"

What next? "Investment" outfits that want to hire rogue trader, coz he's "da best"? Oh wait...

Also, I doubt the quality of Italian exams is very high.

Caching bugs exposed in second biggest DNS server

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Boffin

Fat TCP is fat!

>> I don't think the speed issue is a sufficient disadvantage now.

Think about what the kernel has to do whenever a TCP connection is opened: managed the initial packet exchange (possibly waiting for a long time in case of SYN w/o ACKs), set up queue buffers, set up the TCP state machines (whatever these are), finally hand the client socket to your application, which then has to proceed to do something special, hopefully not create two specialized threads to work with that socket.

In case you don't need all that stuff and it is sufficient to regard the network as just a work queue with incoming 64K contextless packets, use UDP. The kernel will just have to copy the packet into userspace and you app can handle them as fast as they come in.

Loadbalancers on high-traffic websites. They are there for a reason.

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UDP vs. TCP

>> why do we continue to use UDP connections for

I would venture simply because you don't want to suffer the useless TCP connection setup overhead. DNS is just a directory lookup service and apparently suffers from lots of stupid optimization tricks that were relevant when a "DNS server" had to be 30-kg machine in the basement. Still, one wants to avoid the situation where hundreds or thousands of clients per seconds set up and tearing down TCP connections. So the correct way to do is to pack your queries and answers into the 64K offered by connectionless/fire-and-forget UDP. If a query or answer gets lost on the wy, you can simply query again. Perfect. UDP packets may even pass through a congested network where TCP won't even be able to work at all. This is also why SNMP for example uses UDP for short queries and notifications.

HP iron still haunted by ghost of Compaq

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Alert

Editor on ski holiday again?

"With HP and Intel, the main proponents of Itanium at this point, both being partners with Sun with regards to Solaris, the revival of _Sparc on Solaris_ would seem to be long overdue."

That should be "Solaris on Itanium", I would say.

Microsoft trades goodwill for TomTom Linux satisfaction

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Gates Horns

Finally, Microsoft opens fire on the Westerplatte

>> Microsoft said it's turned to the courts having attempted to "engage in licensing discussions" with TomTom for "more than a year."

So why hasn't there been any mention of Microsoft's moves in the press/blogs? What is the advantage to TomTom of hiding the fact that Microsoft tries to extract a bit of protection money? One might have started looking for some prior art. Of course, they could have fallen for the old SCO trick of "we will show you but you will have to sign an NDA first".

Storage breakthrough could bust density record

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Black Helicopters

So don't complain...

...about the costs of detailed telecom data retention, my Good People. Storage costs are going down, yes they are.

NASA talks little green men with Vatican

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Alien

Looking for life in the wrong places...

...all life of any interest in this universe has taken place in the hot, fast and young universe before inflation took over, all in less than one of your gigantic so-called "seconds", you sad representatives of glacially slow scrapyard hobos! Enjoy your cosmic horror show.

New in-the-wild attack targets fully-patched Adobe Reader

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Stop

@Java

"I'll patiently ask if someone can give me a sane reason why Acrobat should have Java scripting functionality? No seriously, I'm genuinely interested to know - I've probably overlooked something obvious."

Indeed. PDF means Postscript. Postscript already _is_ a general programming language.

Now, why have Javascript/Ecmascript (not Java!) in addition? Probably because if you want to attract someone who can do "scripts" it's more likely that he will be attracted to Ecmascripting than Postscripting. Can anyone write Postscript anyway?

UK 'bad' pics ban to stretch?

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Boffin

Oldthinkers unbellyfeel Childprotex!!

Reminds me of the good old times where Miss Teacher somehow hot ahold of my 10-year old extreme porn doodles which went missing during the break but somehow made the rounds, resulting in stern punishment and a sealed letter to the parents, probably outlining my imminent way into hell or something. I still carry that around.

Goggles icon because we need those which automatically turn to nuclear-blast-level filtering mode whenever government-unmandated flesh scenes become apparent so as to keep us all innocent and fluffy forever.

Sub-prang panic: Calm down, it happens all the time

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Yeah!

Congrats for an eminently reasonable position.

It also hear the ex-Soviet navy has a few radioactive rustbuckets hanging in shallow water up North / already dumped onto the sea bottom with minimal supervision and leaching into the foodchain. Apparently no-one gives a f*ck?

We will now retune to Andrew's "Climate Change is a Global Conspiracy!!1!" attitude...

Defacement archive Zone-h gets defaced

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Well, they could do a book with the best 200 defacements...

...it might sell.

Amazon pulls Japanese rape simulator from shelves

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Wow a non-issue for non-people. Just don't buy it, m'okay?

Anyone over the age of 18 getting his/her knickers in a twist about simulo-rape by cel-animated 2D protagonists should seek out the next psychiatrist's couch as he/she has clearly been a victim of grooming by the pink mental rays coming out of politician's behinds whenever they are looking for easily sellable ideas to divert from any real problems coming our way.

So how is the financial meltdown coming?

Cuba crafts extra-communist Linux distro

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Joke

They should have called it GNU/Guevara, of course

Sheeshh

Microsoft celebrates 10,000 US patents

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It's good t know that some people will continue to make my hate list...

"Patents as knowledge-sharing tools may seem counterintuitive at first. After all, patents do give their owners the right to exclude others from using a technology. But even in this case, denying use is very different from denying to others knowledge of the new technology, which patents by law are required to disclose."

And then again, if you find out how a wheel looks and find a way to actually build one from an obfuscated patent filing entilted "Supportive rotary devices which are ALL MINE!" -- but you are ultimately forbidden to do so, what's the use?

As I recall, it is recommended practice at MS to avoid reading patents or looking for patents covering the same areas as one is working on because a) they are impossible to understand b) if the judge finds out that you checked them out before going to work on your new project you are just making your case worse.

Precise gutshots for anyone extolling "Intellectual Property", please.

Large Hadron Timewaster

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Dead Vulture

FAIL

"It seems that, like fractals, which are infinitely complex at whatever scale they are examined, there will always be smaller bits of atoms inside the current smallest bits you are looking at. All you need is an ever-bigger hammer to deconstruct them and the LHS is just a waystation on the path to the ELHC (Even Larger Hadron Collider)."

That's what happens when you have pundits who should first consult a physics manual before pulling out an article about "waste" out of their nether regions. Planck length. Look it up.

And of course there will never be a larger hadron collider. Because you want to get clean collisions when going to higher energies, so back to leptons it will be.

Apple rethinks battery bondage

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So why is this a patent?

Neither new nor unobvious, just a write-up of existing stuff and ideas already out there. Hopefully it won't be granted (not holding my breath there)

World's power grids infested with (more) SCADA bugs

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Coat

Guess that's easy

"How on earth is mission critical software STILL being written that is susceptible to buffer overflows?"

I would guess:

1) Old, old code, and old, old libraries, written by Uncle Fester a few decayears ago

2) People coming out of Uni having caught all the bad habits about how to write "efficient C code". They possibly might think they can do multithreading, too.

3) People a long time out of Uni never having been un-taught all the bad habits about how to write "efficient C code". They possibly might think they know how to program.

4) C code

And also:

Quality Assurance not implemented or degenerated to ticking off boxes. Possibly handled by reconverted beancounters.

Mine's the one with "I worked with Recycled Cobol Monster" on the back.

US Navy spends $12m on electric hypercannon

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War crap junkies

It's not like the US Navy today has more to do than blow away Somali pirates from time to time or maybe deliver force packages onto goats, women and children through their own air arm for in support of their own infantry arm fighting against random sand denizens.

Yes, a railgun will come in handy ...

Iranian rocket puts satellite into orbit

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Nucular weapons here, nucular weapons there

In spite of the say-so of lowlife politicians trying to divert from the sub-basement ideas they deploy on their respective homelands, standard Israeli paranoid casus belli production and breathless reporting by various pundits (including the regular total fscking retardos at The Economist and the BBC) who seem to have forgotten that reporting is not the same as Fearmongering in Abject Submission to Special Interests Groups ("FASSIG"), El Baradei recently had to say that, "for Iran to have weapons capacity, it would have to eject IAEA inspectors, leave the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), reconfigure production to refine uranium to the high degree needed for bomb fuel and fit the material into a warhead" and that it would take 2-5 years. At least. The Murrican Intelligence Community agreed in 2007.

Three hospital worm infection dubbed 'substantive failure'

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Joke

Always look at the bright side...

For once, a hospital-incubated infection to which patients and staff are immune.

Google mistakes entire web for malware

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Alert

Speaking of which

...did anyone else get one of those warnings along the lines that the Googeloïd Search Engine *might* have consented to give you one more result for your query (which was concerning a problem with a SATA drive, in case you were wondering) but *as* that page was listed in a the IWF blocking list, Googeloïd sadly *cannot* show the corresponding link in its search results (even though I am not even using Google from the UK). It then proceeds to give you a link to a vanilla protest page at chillingeffects.org.

Doner kebabs: Death wrapped in pitta bread

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Bon appetit!

Some comments in here were definitely worth it for the induced flashbacks to alt.tasteless (if anyone still knows what that is/was). Good job, gentlemen and moderatrice.

Open-sourcers get with the git

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Stop

Sod that!

I have moved our small dev team from CVS to subversion and, by golly, am gonna stay on it. I don't know where the desire to do "still better" would come from. The idea that svn is somehow connected to the "Big Corporate Repository" is totally idiotic; now there is a confusion between a technical implementation and political structure.

Seagate isolates 'potential' Barracuda flaw

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I can't wait for the recession to go full steam

"It tends to be the case that companies within a sector compete on customer service, where the competition has none, there's no incentive for them to excel in it."

There will be very obliging low-paid customer service representatives with excellent diligence real soon now.

Govt uses Obscenity Law to stuff up cartoon sex loophole

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Hmmm.... "open loopholes"

"Ahh I'd forgotten about Saikano - there's a manga that you can't read vol 3 on the bus. That was an awsome manga, anime wasn't upto much though."

What, because of the tearful underage shagging? So that's why the grannies are throwing dirty looks at me.

What about reading the obligatory "bondage + underage incest" printed out from an arbitrary rapidshare download, then. I would avoid the ones which also throw in a dog or two cause one has to draw the line somewhere...

In any case -- politicians expressing moral outrage/disgust in public to troll for a bigoted electorate are the most base creatures yet.

Ballmer's big regret at 10: Losing the interwebs

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Gates Horns

So we got away by the skin of our teeth?

Imagine "The Internets" as a walled garden of "Microsoft Network" hosted content, accessible from dial-in POPs installed in each country, using proprietary "de facto" standards which are based on septic, festering, semi-disclosed specifications "available under reasonable licensing conditions". Said Internets being brought down regularly by worms, the "desktops" of the connectionati being mercilessly eaten from within by rogue code blooming out kernel-referenced DLLs...

'Miracle' plane crash was no miracle

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Dead Vulture

How does that work then?

"the one passenger who turned on his cell phone so his GPS could be used to locate his body"

So this is a GPS+cell phone combo (A hefty affair. Can you take these on planes these days without risiking an impromptu proctological examination by TSA gorillas?)

So the GPS module determines current position. But then it has to do something with that data, like send it out over the cellular network. More likely the GPS would just have told the dead passenger where he currently was, which would be pointless of course.

On the other hand, this is probably not "real GPS". Instead the user hoped that cell phone position tracking using base station triangulation would enable friends and family to locate his cell-phone equipped mortal remains - as long as they were not underwater. It is unfortunate that this is apparently also called "Cell Phone GPS" by marketdroids.

Prolific worm infects 3.5m Windows PCs

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Alert

Today is Large Hadron Collider day??

"And this is why Linux is not mainstream. It is simply too hard to do everyday tasks with. "

OH SH*T MAN CERN HAS FINALLY OPENED THAT TIMEWARP TUNNEL BACK TO THE NINETIES QUICK CLOSE IT NOW THERE ARE ALREADY HOLLOW VOICES COMING OUT OF THAT HOLE OHMYGOD WE ARE SO FRACKED.

Brit porn filter censors 13 years of net history

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Stop

Accidental Child Porn! Argh!

>> The idea that you might "accidentally" come across child porn is laughable - has this happened to anybody? Certainly not me and nobody I know has ever come across any.

It can happen if you are visiting those semi-managed picture sites (cough). There are regular spambots posting child porn with links to "moar" or weirdos who seem to be bored with their basement lifestyle and feel the urge to piss off people "out there in the Internets". Once the moderator wakes up / has finished his schoolwork / comes home, the stuff gets deleted pretty quickly.

Now, I hear that even some kind of cartoons from the shores of Japan or even the fugly reuse of Simpson characters are considered child porn these days , so you might come accidentally across "CP" faster than you might think.

In any case, you know that you need to bash some law-and-order politicians' heads with a 5 kg crowbar when you catch yourself worrying about accidentally encountering <insert arbitrary type of content here>.

Pro-Palestine vandals deface Army, NATO sites

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Go

They would have to tell 60 web surfers...

...to look at a website, then deface it repeatedly a few others later. Then blame the UN for not pulling down the website earlier. Then saying that there were actually bots among those surfers, so the defacement was entirely justified. Then retreating to moral high ground because, as defacers, they previously had suffered at the hand of Microsoft.

Obama urged to relax US tech restrictions

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Ha Ha Ha!

>> This is yet another transparent play by corporations to be allowed to import foreigners to do jobs for half the pay of Americans.

If Americans can't be arsed to do the job that apparently can be done for the correct market price (apparently half the going rate) by "foreigners" ... so be it!

Because of course, America is a burnt cookie in that case anyway.

Sun downgraded to Goldman Sachs sell list

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"Goldman Sachs has no choice"

>> Paulson told them that they would have to take the funds whether they were needed or not

So your ex-chairman stuffs you full of dollars you actually don't need, whether you want or not. This either means a big party with stolen money is in the pipeline or someone is telling lies like there is no tomorrow. Probably both.

>> GS were one of the few banks that made a net profit in 2008.

How can they know that in the first place in January 2009? Probably didn't yet check their books yet. Or they don't care. Or maybe they just booked the 10 billions to the lower right end of the balance sheet.

>> that doesn't mean their IT analysts are suddenly irrelevant.

They have been irrelevant from the beginning I guess.