Posts by John Smith 19

When you need something to lubricate the wheels of oppression...

Mines the one with the tub of petroleum jelly in the pocket.

Should that not be "Blame the NSA"

Who after all are doing this.

And yes that pretty much cuts the rug out from the US playing the whole "Champion of Freedom (TM)" BS.

Leopards and spots.

This is the "new" Microsoft?

Sounds a lot like the old MS to me, but now your data could be could be dumped $deity knows where with $deity knows what privacy laws.

You say "cloud" I say "mainrframe"

You say "browser" I say "universal dumb terminal"

Let's look at the mainframe history.

Any one here know what it was like to port

IBM mainframe <--> Sperry <--> Burroughs (Stack architecture M/F with no MMU) <--> ICL (single Accumulator) <--> Amdahl (IBM compatible designed by Ex IBMer)

Most descriptions I've read come down to "It was Hell on Earth" or "It was quite easy as we'd planned to rehost the software from day one."

I'm sure portability is possible if you plan for it.

Just like it always has been.

The paradox

We can't find bad guys in the mountain of s**t we collect (mostly because we can)

So we want to collect even more.

Spoken like a true data fetishist.

You say "terrorist network"

I say "Couple of saddo nut cases who didn't want to be nobodies anymore."

The takeaway fact

The fresh meat needs to get a little seasoning.

Or to put it a little differently

Less Moss, more Jen.

Yes I don't like HR very much.

They will have an open, fair and transparent procurement.

Then hand it to a (newly acquired) subsidiary of BAe.

Same as always

2 questions

WTF is it and WTF does it do.

"recognise patterns in data without a human"

So going for the holy grail of counter terrorism, studying every persons personal comms map and sptting the terrorists.

What an utter load of b**lcks.

As always observation >> climate model simulation.

Thumbs up for a more detailed database to chew on.

One question unanswered. Does it uplink the results or is it recovered and data dumped periodically?

Note their comment about the *whole* stack

IE decisions made about what data is sent (number of retries, level of error correction, if any, applied at this stack level) can have serious IE non linear effects on throughput.

Keep in mind that sacrificing guaranteed access to the medium to radically increase apparent bandwidth (for those actually using the medium) was a key feature of the original Ethernet protocol.

I agree though that a battery powered light switch is (conceptually) stupid.

That said there are (industrial) radio switches powered by the act of pressing them. That starts to sound sort of reasonable.

But I'm not that big a fan of the idea to begin with.

Mine's the one with Vernor Vinges' "A Deepness in the Sky," which is the only novel I'm aware of that looks at this idea even slightly.

"Vodaphone...""..has denied the GCHQ had direct access to its network"

As for it's subsidiaries.

Not so sure.

If people are worried about it's security can't they just down load the source & build their own?

It 's open source, right?

As usual the question is how many of those 4 line up anywhere?

And of course how many providers let a raw digital data stream onto their SIM cards?

I have no idea.

And choosing a train derailment. That's more like an intelligence or terrorist thing (kill 200 to hide a murder).

This is good work. I think it's clear some organisations would like to pretend this does not exist, which is reckless stupidity.

Has no one considered the possibilty of a *terrific* new TV series?

Hilarious opportunities for culture clashes galore.

It's a "professionals" style bomber jacket.

RIP Lewis

My onging question when a new one of these turns up is...

Any closer to Muon catalysed nuclear fusion?

In this case probably not.

Note the GPS were *not* the most accurate design.

They were the most accurate design you could pack in a satellite small enough you could build 38 of and put in a 1000Km orbit, along with a chunk of TTL logic for the code generating.

However they are available and they have a nice big back catalogue of data to chomp through.

Clever idea. Let's see what happens.

Hold up "Manager" at 500-650 pd ??

That sort of money's for obeying orders, not giving them.

"live and die by their security." Except in America, where THE PATRIOT makes it BS

Enough with this "cloud" b**locks.

It's a network of servers permitting application and data migrationwithin the network.

Now try and migrate to another cloud.

I wonder if Maude even know how many data centres the UK Govt has?

I'd suggest a hell of a lot more than it needs give bureaucratic empire building over decades.

It's a start

But they have to go much higher.

The UK. 400 ISP's. 399 running over BT Open Reach cables.

<profanity filter off>

You are still BT's bitches.

</profanity filter off>

OfCom? You are f**king kidding me.

Historically the magnetic bits have been *very* hard to beat.

This is pretty impressive.

Thumbs up.

Just getting these trains running at normal network speeds is a *big* step forward

Otherwise you have to run it at ungodly hours.

IIRC one of the big issues with the UK rail infrastructure is that when BR was chopped up the replacement infrastructure company lost the temperature records for large parts of the network.

The temperature exposure pattern to the steel in the rail (and making sure the steel is the right grade to begin with) have major effects on rail life and replacement frequency.

It's a pretty amazing train and I just hope the follow up remedial work is as effective.

George Turners "Beloved Son" would also be a candidate for this.

The idea of the crew of a returning starship finding that while they had all come home they "Weren't from round here" anymore.

Glum.

Interesting idea.

Prizes have worked for NASA before including the Lunar Lander Challenge and the new Spacesuit glove.

Station keeping with an airship should be better than a balloon, which is needed for long term static observations.

But lift falls with air density and at 20Km that's about 1/8 that of Sea Level.

I hope this produces results but it's not going to be easy.

Surprised *anyone* else noticed it.

Yes it's an anorak.

In businesmans foreplay someone *always* gets screwed.

The question is who?

Do you *really* need the wavelength precision of a laser?

Other options include intense arc lamps, but all systems will need substantial power systems.

There is a reason why people use rockets and drive them with combustion driven turbo pumps.

They generate huge power levels in compact systems.

So another bad default configuration by distro suppliers?

Looks that way.

I sometime wonder if a distro shipped with pretty much all features on all packages set to minimal allowed functions how many users would notice.

Sniffing cell towers and GPS. Good. Passing that information to someone else.

F**k right off.

Read that as...

"a one-click utility that can automatically disable Internet Explorer."

But I can do that already.

Sweet

If you're a large scale credit card details thief.

Not so sweet if you're the victim.

It's *our* data, not theirs

What is so f**king hard to understand?

Pants way to do a hoverboard..

Now a layer of flagellum motors driven by an ATP supply would be clever.

Probably a bit limited in its maximum altitude to no more than a Km however.

Still need the microcode for the chips and the detailed specs.

Alto was a microcoded processor. So without the microcode you can't map the executables to the Alto opcodes.

BTW Is "Bravo" word processor the core for MS Windows?

The problem is not this generation but the *next* generation

Bottom line, their internal needs were simply not going to cover their costs. Acting as an outsourced supplier to other companies should have covered their costs but it didn't.

The gorilla in the room is that in a few generations time we will be down to a 1 atom wide transistor.

And at that point everyone is f**ked.

Or you could use a small asteroid.

That will buy you a couple of metres of solid rock to sit inside of.

That way it does not matter how long it takes to get there.

The problem is what *sort* of device is a smart phone?

Seriously. is it a microwave oven (when was the last time you saw a software update for a microwave? or a real computer?

Historically phone companies did not issue SW updates for phones because they did not need to. They were analogue and had no processor.

Now if you want to offer a computer with built in mobile phone capability they should accept they have to support it like a computer OS.

And of course you get the issues of 3rd party software.