* Posts by breakfast

1556 publicly visible posts • joined 24 May 2007

Kill Flash: Adobe says patch to fix under-attack hole still days away

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Re: practise your pontifications

I have had Flash crash out repeatedly on the Reg site, often as a result of ads on their homepage as far as I can tell. It's good of them to be recommending that we do the right thing, even if it must hit their own advertising revenues.

BBC bypasses Linux kernel to make streaming videos flow

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Re: This is why I love the bbc

Also "iPlayer" is a brilliant name, once you realise it's not only a video playback tool, it's one that relies on the IP layer.

'We jokingly call Apple the Tesla graveyard. Cook gets our sloppy rejects. LOL'

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Nuclear wolves? Where?

"Nuclear werewolves of the Ukraine" is a great title for something. Hopefully a documentary, but I'd settle for a postrock album.

Google and pals launch Accelerated Mobile Pages project

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Boffin

Also Android devices suck at JavaScript.

In most places you are correct, but this seems to me to be a move they are making because JavaScript on Android is horribly sluggish. A modern Android device is an order of magnitude slower at rendering JavaScript than an equivalent iOS device - the Discourse team give a good idea of the state of play - and rather than solving the problem with the rendering stack they make the call to exclude JavaScript.

THIS is MASSIVE! Less-Masslessness neutrino boffins bag Physics Nobel

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Always with the neutrinos these days

With the kids these days it's all neutrino this and neutrino that, nobody even talks about the old trinos any more.

Australian boffins say Quantum Pentiums are on the horizon

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Re: So a quantum breakthrough

Quantum computing is approaching fast, but we don't know where it is.

Or we do know where it is, but we don't know whether or not it is approaching fast.

Terror in the Chernobyl dead zone: Life - of a wild kind - burgeons

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Re: Hmmm

I don't know how one would remove an entirely useless third of the population, although I did hear that a giant space-goat was likely to eat the sun, so maybe we should design an escape strategy for *cough* everyone.

THESE ARE THE VOYAGES of the space probe Discovery

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Coat

Good news for computer science

As a programmer, it would be nice to have the opportunity to work on the DAVINCI code.

UK.gov creates £500K fund to help universities teach cyber skills

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Mushroom

Re: I didn't know UK.gov still used "cyber"

But it was Cyber in 1998. I don't want cyber-reality because I'm not running a freaking Geocities site.

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Stop

"Cyber" - why does this word still exist. It's a weird nineties throwback. Nobody does "cyber" any more. The need for robes and wizard hats is greatly reduced.

US military personnel investigated for splashing $96,576 on strippers

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AUD rate

Given the exchange rate last time I was out that way, that fifty might account for most of the $93000 right there.

Anti-peeping-tom drone law nixed in California

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Angel

Super Cali legalises perverts eye-in-sky buzz?

Game, set and DEATHMATCH: Drone TERROR ORDEAL at US Open tennis tournament

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Childcatcher

An avoidable disaster

IF ONLY there had been someone around with a piece of equipment that could have been used for knocking a small object back into the sky, this whole sorry affair would have been avoidable. I look forward to the time when this type of equipment is available at all tennis matches.

OFFICIAL: Zuck's BIG in-your-face Facebook Messenger SHOVE finally pays off

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I had noticed that happening but hadn't figured out the cause. The insistence on Messenger particularly irritates me as I like to have a phone battery life of more than four hours and Facebook Messenger appears to prohibit that.

Oh no, startup Massive Analytic unleashes 'artificial precognition'

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Re: As with all spammers

I disagree actually, I would say they need to be better than not using them. However I doubt that any of the data tools around are better than nothing at all, let alone better than a well designed marketing strategy based by regular market research. At some point they will be, but then they'll end up in the market researchers' toolbox anyway.

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IT Angle

The thing about software like this is that, in general, it doesn't work very well on real world data. Real data is complicated, untidy and it is very hard to turn it into anything informative even if you know how to interpret language and tie together the data in this excel spreadsheet, that long-abandoned CRM database, another database which someone made as a spreadsheet because they don't know what databases do, and that huge archive of word documents and scanned PDFs.

Even working with curated and well designed data, big data inference tools are as likely to be stumped or to raise spurious correlations which require a lot of statistical knowledge to verify or disprove.

I anticipate a long chain of disappointed customers and a start-up selling software that never quite does what their sales team claim until they run out of rubes to sell to and quietly vanish beneath the waves.

Ashley Madison: ‘Our site is full of women, and members are growing’

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In other news

Apparently Ashley Madison have a girlfriend "but she goes to another school."

BOFH: An architect and his own entirely avoidable downfall

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Terminator

You don't ask the BOFH to list only the good things that come to his mind about his mother.

Visitors no longer welcomed to Scotland's 'Penis Island'

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Childcatcher

Re: apparently...

Wait, so it wasn't called Penis Island but the young children's TV Show "Bod" does translate as Penis? THIS IS A FAR BIGGER STORY!

Won't somebody think of the children? I mean, they're not children now, obviously, they're me and maybe a fair few other readers here. But maybe we wouldn't all be reading stories about penis islands if we hadn't been subliminally assailed with Scottish knobbery from an early age!

Japan's 'White Stork' soars heavenwards to ISS

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Classic send up

"As well as the usual dried food and water for the orbiting outpost's crew..."

I guess they must save a lot of space by sending up dried water.

Watch out Sonos! Here's the second coming of Yamaha MusicCast

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Unhappy

Deep time

"Eternity was mentioned frequently, and you can’t get more life-enhancing than that, surely."

They are onto a winner here. What could be more life-enhancing than the fact that from the perspective of any sufficiently long timescale our lives are no more than the tiniest flicker, of no possible impact or value, just a momentary sputter of energy in the endless river of meaningless dust.

Thanks Yamaha, my life feels a lot enhanced.

Adulterers antsy as 'entire' Ashley Madison databases leak online

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Headmaster

Re: We are forgeting the important part

Contractors are usually on fairly strong contracts ( there in the name ) and if it proves to be from an ex-contractor they will have an immediate recourse to law and will be able to sue them to the limits of their finances and then also to the limits of their insurance cover.

Mumsnet founder 'swatted by misogynist griefers'

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Black Helicopters

Re: What If

Good point. Except that there is no evidence that misogynists ( of whom there seems to be a bafflingly huge number relative to a handful of actual misandrists ) need any help at all in making themselves look like repugnant imbeciles. They seem to actively enjoy it, in the same way that American conservatives do. Maybe it's just the new fashion with the young people and whathaveyou. Probably in a few years they'll look back and be as cringingly embarrassed by their antics as we are witnessing them.

Snowball spud gun shows comets could have seeded Earth with life

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Boffin

Is it easier for it to start from a comet?

My organic chemistry knowledge is basically zero, so the part I'm not following is why it is more likely that these chemicals would have originated from a comet than from lightning striking primordial soup, or whatever the currently favoured terrestrial theory for the origin of complex proteins is.

Are these chemicals more common on comets than they would have been in an early terrestrial environment? How did they get onto the comets in the first place? Did they just happen there? Is the universe surprisingly high in protein?

'I don't recognise Amazon as a bullying workplace' says Bezos

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IT Angle

An easily solved problem

Clearly what he needs to do is declare a WAR ON STRESS.

It worked for Reynholm Industries, it could work for them.

Want Edward Snowden pardoned? You're in the minority, say pollsters

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Coat

Re: Remember

Now you're just being mean.

Is this the most puzzling DEF CON attendee badge yet on record?

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If it were me I would hide the interesting stuff in the music on the other side...

Surprise! Evil-eyed cats MORE LIKELY to be SNEAKY PREDATORS – boffins

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Headmaster

Top innovation

Having read up a lot on equine physiology I was under the impression that this was fairly widely acknowledged.

This has certainly affected my enjoyment of monsters in popular media- when they turn up with a horizontal pupil I start thinking "wait, this is a prey-animal eye, how did that evolve?"

Clueless do-gooders make Africa's conflict mineral mines even more dangerous

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Paris Hilton

Re: Ah

As an alternative are you suggesting that nobody should do anything to try and improve matters anywhere because they may not have foreseen every possible consequence of their actions?

Playing with graphene? All the cool kids are using TIN – atom-thick sheets of stanene

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Re: Picking Nits: TIN versus Tin

Of course if a conductive form of lead could be produced with the requisite flexibility and conductivity we could make lead led leads for lead guitarists. If they were exclusively designed to power their fretlights they would be for lead guitarists' LEDs.

Hacklands introducing geeks to something called 'outdoors'

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Coat

Re: super cow powers.

Sounds like you're describing that most terrifying of weapons, what the scots refer to as a "military coo."

Lucky we're all getting our coats ahead of this camping trip.

Bloke cuffed for blowing low-flying camera drone to bits with shotgun

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Joke

@Doctor Syntax

Well, maybe you shouldn't be flying your drone through the men's showers?

Just ONE THOUSAND times BETTER than FLASH! Intel, Micron's amazing claim

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Re: It is about time

I reckon they meant the fusion of Jazz and rock favoured by bands such as Weather Report, which we actually have had since the 1970s, so no cause for complaint there really.

Slashdot, SourceForge looking for new owners after parent dumps them on the web's doorstep

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Re: My greatest fear

I think I originally came here from Slashdot about twelve years ago after it was pointed out that every interesting story there was a repost of something from here.

At last we know for sure. Blighty's 'best mobile network' is ...

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Facepalm

EE have signal sometimes

With my phone on EE I often have no signal. When I have a data connection it has a selection of letters: 'H', 'H+', 'G', 'E' and maybe a few others? Anyway experience has shown that all of these letters signify that I have download rate a little slower than a 22.5k dial-up modem.

Universal Credit white elephant needs 'urgent breakthrough' says MP

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Mushroom

How?

How have they spent this much money? What on earth are they doing?

I mean, I get how you could spend a few million on getting a good size team of decent developers to build your application for you and more for some solid hardware to run it on or to hire the cloud services that it will need, but sixteen billion???

That is more than the annual cost of all unemployment benefits put together. What is wrong with them?

This is where private sector involvement falls down. If they had simply recruited and employed all the staff needed to design, implement and maintain this, it would have cost far less than they have already spent. The British government spends far too little on hiring good people, too much on horrible, awful, appallingly designed private sector contracts. Great if your ministers want a directorship but a shitty deal for us as taxpayers.

Github's 'Atom' text editor hits version 1.0

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Re: I wouldn't bother

My experience has been that when you take JavaScript out of it's natural, browser, home it is a little hard to make it perform well. Background Node stuff is more than willing to swallow most of my computer's resources if I have it running. Also it has an irritating tendency of locking up and getting itself detached but not stopping, and just sitting around hogging memory.

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Mushroom

"This is no child of mine" - Emacs

Goes to install Atom.

Downloads Windows installer package.

Runs it.

Waits for an installation path to be queried.

No installation path is forthcoming.

Editor is installed to some god-forsaken corner of the user profile folder, with no option for it to go anywhere else. Apparently this is by design.

Uninstalls Atom.

Why OH WHY did Blighty privatise EVERYTHING?

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Re: While we're talking about money...

Way!

Abort, abort! Metal-on-metal VIOLENCE as Google's robo-car nearly CRASHES

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Coat

If this is an argument, the quality of dissent is really going down hill.

As the US realises it's been PWNED, when will OPM heads roll?

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Trollface

Re: Katherine Archuleta is lying to Congress!

This is about the only solution to the problem - but not just the OPM, To clear the risks caused by this compromise they just have to to fire everyone who has gone through that vetting system. From what I can tell that means a complete government staff turnover. Should be exciting times watching a completely new civil service try to figure out how to do their jobs...

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Facepalm

Might as well leave the stable door open now

Given that all the most personal information about everybody in the US intelligence services is now available to at least one hostile nation, why bother with more security infrastructure now? I mean really, how much worse can it get?

Going to be very interesting to see how things go on as this information starts to be used. Guessing the US are going to have to be bringing a lot of people home from various parts of the world over the next few months...

Shadow of the Beast: Amiga classic returns from the darkness

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Re: Ooops, pet peeve triggered

I don't enjoy fiddly and ridiculous game difficulties, but I do rather enjoy a bit of Dark Souls, which is punishingly difficult but never feels unfair, it just makes you angry with yourself for being such an idiot. Of course it does also give you safe starting points and allow you to start from different ones, which is something those old-school games could really have used doing.

The old fashioned thing where you had to learn to be pixel perfect on a specific jump was purely frustrating, but games where the way you win is by learning to be better at the game - as opposed to simply by persisting - are something I can get behind.

THEY WANTED OUR WOMEN: Neanderthals lusted after modern humans

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Interspecies DNA exchange

When I was at school we learned that one of the markers of speciation was that you didn't have fertile offspring between different species, which left me questioning how the DNA got here at all. Luckily the internet exists so here is an interesting explanation of how Neanderthal DNA probably got into anatomically modern humans.

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Re: TIL about centimorgans

But what is that in double-decker busses?

Virtual reality below the prehistoric waves: David Attenborough's First Life

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Mushroom

Anomalocaris

Whenever I see a picture of Anomalocaris I am reminded of A Colder War.

How much info did hackers steal on US spies? Try all of it

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Coat

Re: Lots of people have to fill this out

And so is my Porn Name!

4 new twists that push the hacker attack on millions of US govt workers into WTF land

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Mushroom

Re: @ Doctor Syntax

Social Security Numbers are the absolute least of it. They took the results of the security clearance background checks - those are an in-depth exploration of the risks a person might present if given security clearance, all the bad debts, past affairs and other secrets that might make them vulnerable to blackmail. It would be hard to imagine a more complete treasure-trove of information for a hostile intelligence agency or a more enormous and comprehensive screw up from any government organisation with the least interest in the wellbeing of the state.

Moon blocks Uranus for stargazers Down Under

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Re: Pronunciation change?

So less like "yer ANus" and more like "YOUR anus"?

Yup, that's much better.

Women are fleeing from the digital sector, reckons UK.gov report

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Re: High WIS

Jeff Atwood talked about about this a while back: http://blog.codinghorror.com/software-developers-and-aspergers-syndrome/ ( with interesting follow-up pertinent to the original story here: http://blog.codinghorror.com/what-can-men-do/ )

The ratio of autism diagnosis is 4:1 in favour of males, but the incidence of female autism spectrum problems is higher than most people realise because women tend to manifest symptoms a little differently - possibly as a result of cultural conditioning - and they can often go without being diagnosed.