Re: 3 years! Come on.
Believe it or not, this is the fast track. The usual process would take at least twice the time.
Posts by ratfox
3721 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Sep 2007
Page:
Google tries to MAP its way out of competition trouble in Brussels
Google, please DRILL through Great Firewall of China with your HTTPS LANCE
Leaked MS ad video parodies Chrome as surveillance tech
'High impact' Gmail password security hole blew accounts wide open
Google puts Dr Who's Tardis onto Street View - and you can get INSIDE
Friday 22nd November 2013 15:42 GMT
You missed the Dalek
Get out of the Tardis, in the field, and have a look around. Anonymised horse, sheesh.
The buttons on the control panel have tooltips indicating what they do.
Oh, and if you use the red button for the map, you can go back to Earl's Court Road, use StreetView and get inside the Tardis again, while being inside of the Tardis.
Of course, there is nothing wrong with having the Tardis on the inside of the Tardis, since it's bigger inside…
'Fatal flaws' in Google's revised search antitrust overhaul, says Foundem
Vint Cerf: 'Privacy may be an ANOMALY, now over'. And it's no secret I think that
Wednesday 20th November 2013 13:56 GMT
Privacy is not an anomaly, anonymity is
People used to mostly have privacy, unless somebody cared enough to pay a man to follow them around. Remember when divorce cases involved private detectives taking pictures of the unfaithful fooling around? It seems old hat now that we have Internet (though I'm sure it still exists). But apart from that, people used to have privacy.
However, anonymity has barely ever existed, outside from anonymous letters to newspapers and graffiti. The anonymity that people take now for granted on the web, and which they are outraged about when they lose it, has existed for max 20 years. How the world changes…
Carl Icahn: I don't want to fight with Tim... but I will
Tuesday 19th November 2013 11:57 GMT
"Apple has all this money"
I don't know where he gets this idea from. Apple has almost no cash available. In fact, it had to raise money from bonds to pay its dividend. All the cash Apple is hoarding is overseas, and Apple cannot bring it back into the US without paying tax on it.
What Icahn is proposing is borrowing money on the basis of future presumed returns, and give that money to investors. It's kind of the reverse of investing for the future.
Google WILL wriggle away from Euro probe... but THEN what?
Google coughs up $17m to end Safari STALKER COOKIE brouhaha
Tuesday 19th November 2013 08:19 GMT
"If you have a claim, then prove it or shut up"
Unfortunately, laws are not and cannot be written in a way which defines clearly and exactly what is and what is not legal. There are always grey areas, corner cases. The only way to determine whether something is "legal" or not is often to wait until the end of a lengthy trial; and the worst is that the outcome depends on which side has the best lawyers! This sounds ridiculous, especially to scientists and IT people who live in a world defined by clear rules, in which claims can indeed be "proven". But nobody has invented a better system yet.
In those circumstances, this kind of settlements save a lot of time. It sends the message that what they did was probably wrong, and that anybody doing this will have to pay for it one way or another.
Schiller: 'Almost everyone' at Apple works on iPhones - not Macs or anything
Saturday 16th November 2013 20:01 GMT
"I don't see any progress that couldn't have been accompished by a team of 30 people."
Considering apparently nobody else came up with it, it might well be that they needed thousands of people to make many trials, and 30 of them came up with the right solution?
More probably, you are severely underestimating the amount or work to create the iPhone. That I remember, it took years for the competition to come up with a phone that was about as good as the iPhone. (I'm thinking Galaxy Nexus, which came out four years after the first iPhone.)
People are always at their most clever in hindsight.
Google Earth SHOCK: ZERO point ZERO ZERO SIX of world forests disappear each year
Friday 15th November 2013 14:24 GMT 
This does not look good
Despite the seemingly cheerful tone of the article, I find losing 5% of the world's forests in 12 years is extremely worrying. Unless a huge effort to reverse the trend is done, there won't be any forests left in just two centuries.
I would really not be comfortable with kicking the can and just say "our grandchildren will take care of that in a hundred years".
Snappers attack Google Image problem, demand action from EC officials
Friday 15th November 2013 12:07 GMT
"abusing its dominant position in search"
There might well be something to the idea that Google makes it easy for people to view images without visiting the websites. This is an especially big problem when you can see the images in big resolution directly from Google. This is not like an article excerpt, which induces viewers to read the full article on the web site; in many cases, you don't even need to visit the web site after having seen the image.
On the other hand, I fail to see how Google is particularly abusing of its dominant position in search in this.
Canadian teens cuffed over alleged Snapchat child sex pics ring
Friday 15th November 2013 07:51 GMT 
Good example of the way words can be twisted
This fits in every way the definition of child pornography. Except that when politicians suggest upending the way the whole Internet works in order to fight child porn, they probably don't have this kind of petty crime in mind.
That aside, the Snapchat claims seem completely bogus to me. Surely you can just snapshot a snapchat, and keep the picture forever…?
Web giants cry foul over US gov's refusal to budge on NSA spy gag orders
High-end Samsung slabs, cheapie Androids take healthy BITE out of Apple's market share
Chinese web firms sue search giant Baidu for video piracy
Ricoh Theta 360˚ camera: Point and click immersive imaging
Wednesday 13th November 2013 20:22 GMT
Re: No Photosphere ?
Indeed, this would seem a great accessory for Photosphere.
I love photospheres, but it is a bitch to do right. I tend to have to make at least three attempts to get something correct. And if there are people walking around, then you have body parts flying around.
My wife tends to get annoyed at having to wait for me while I turn slowly around…
Is it all up for LANDFILL ANDROID? BEHOLD, the Moto G
Publishers reject Google's revised offer to fix search biz in Europe
Google makes Gmail EVEN NOISIER, or should that be nosier?
Google to web: SHUT YOUR MOUTH or Chrome 32 beta will do it for you
Woz: Google Glass will be SO COOL... just like BLUETOOTH
HUMANITY STUNNED - Apple Retina iPad Mini arrives. A solemn moment
'F-CK YOU GOOGLE+' ukelele missy scoops BIG WAD of $$ - for Google
Monday 11th November 2013 13:23 GMT
Re: yea google F*ck you
Indeed, it's becoming rarer and rarer that you can just leave a comment without registering. Number of websites use Facebook comments too.
I remember the astonishment, 15 years ago, at how wild people were behaving on the web, trolling newsgroups and the like. In general, anonymity was fingered as the reason. Are these days over? Will the times come when using your real name on the web will be the norm, and using a pseudonym considered the equivalent of wearing a mask in the street?
Buy-curious minxes and chaps fancy hot wrist action, rest of us baffled
Friday 8th November 2013 11:36 GMT
Re: I don't want a watch, I want a Leela-from-Futurama wristcomp
Mostly, I think the biggest problem at the moment is the weight. It would probably be too heavy to be comfortable.
And also, probably too few people want something like this for it to be produced in reasonable prices. Wait 10 years of failed products first.
How Google paved the way for NSA's intercepts - just as The Register predicted 9 years ago
Thursday 7th November 2013 21:08 GMT
Re: I expect to get a zillion downvotes but...
Seems like playing on words to me; users do click a box saying that Google can collect and use the information in their emails, and not that the NSA can collect and use the information in their emails.
The exact definition you give to "read", "search", "scan" and "analyse" are pretty irrelevant here.
Furious Google techie on NSA snooping: 'F*CK THESE GUYS'
Google's secret search offer to EU antitrust chief LEAKED by rivals
Wednesday 6th November 2013 19:08 GMT
If Google left European Union…
Yeah right. Google makes tons of money in Europe, and as long as they want to do that, they'll have to comply with European regulations.
And no, redirecting all traffic to your .com domain and shutting down .fr and .de domains does not make you exempt from EU regulations either. If it was that easy, all corporations would have their sites in .tv
Google Helpout live vids: Helping you help us help ourselves, says web giant
Is it TRUE what they say about the 'Moto G'? We FIND OUT on the 13th
iPad Air peels off in racy pics for wide-eyed geeks, reveals 'worst battery ever
Google barge erection hypegasm latest - What's in the box?
iPad Air not very hot: Apple fanbois SHUN London fondleslab launch
Friday 1st November 2013 13:30 GMT
Re: Re I'd missed your Apple bullshit for the last week
Heh. Compare with the gushing going on here:
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2013/11/01/apple-ipad-air-launch-videos/
IT'S patent WAR: Apple, Microsoft vs Google, Samsung, Huawei
We'll build Elon Musk's Hyperloop ... if you lob us ONE-MEELLION dollars
Thursday 31st October 2013 19:08 GMT
No chance in hell
The project as stated grossly underestimates the costs and the physics problems, and grossly overestimates the number of potential customers. This cannot work.
This is not the first attempt to have a levitated train-like vehicle in a vacuum tube. It's hard. And this project does not even go for full vacuum, so you have to fight air resistance.
I'm sure you can get a nice salary by trying for a few years to make it work. But you will not make any money by investing in it.
NSA, UK hacked Yahoo! and Google data center interconnects – report
Thursday 31st October 2013 12:18 GMT
@Don Jefe
The diagram does not say removed/restored, it says added and removed.
This is because SSL is supposed to provide security on the Internet, where your data transits through semi random routing point you do not trust. That is the left part of the diagram. The right part of the diagram is Google's private infrastructure, where SSL is not needed. Google only recently realized that encryption is also necessary on its private infrastructure, but they are certainly not using SSL for this, but probably their own private encryption which may be both more powerful and simpler than SSL, because they can taylor it to their needs, and they don't need to wait for every browser out there to implement it, as they own both ends.
The central linking point between the two network is not where the NSA dastardly messes with SSL certificates because the protocol is broken; it is the point where Google removes the SSL (when going left to right) or adds the SSL (right to left) because it does not make sense to use SSL on the private infrastructure…
Just explaining, since, you know, you obviously can read diagrams but you apparently have trouble understanding the information.
Facebook Zucks up $2bn sales, record profit - but stock fell. What gives?
Thursday 31st October 2013 07:39 GMT
Re: Gravity always wins
Amazon is reinvesting its profits for growth, and is constantly looking for new business opportunities. Facebook on the other hand seems not to want to be more than a social network.
As an example, Amazon has a line of tablets which sell quite well. Facebook offered a phone, kind of, and it did not sell.
Windows Azure Compute cloud goes TITSUP planet-wide
Google's new broadband offer: 20-days of WiFi for a quid
Anonymity is the enemy of privacy, says RSA grand fromage
Tuesday 29th October 2013 15:18 GMT
Sounds illogical to me
But hey, not an expert.
I would like to note, though, that even though people might claim a historical right to privacy, it is much harder to claim a historical right to anonymity. Before the internet, anonymity was strictly the domain of ROMANES EUNT DOMUS graffitis, anonymous letters, and possibly certain private clubs for the connoisseurs.
I'm old enough to remember the articles in the early noughties commenting how all this "newsgroup trolling" and general uncivility on the Web were due to this strange and novel anonymity enjoyed by Internet users.
Dino-boffins discover 100-million-year-old BIRD TRACKS in Australia
Tuesday 29th October 2013 13:22 GMT
Mandatory XKCD
Dinosaurs are still living among us, for birds are dinosaurs.
Mozilla goes where Google fears to tread with geolocation service
Tuesday 29th October 2013 07:42 GMT 
Wait a minute
"Google got into fearful trouble by recording the location of WiFi transceivers without asking for their owners' permission"
No. Google got in trouble for recording the data that was going through the WiFi networks. Recording the location of the WiFi networks has not been a problem at all, as far as I can tell…
How I BLEW my co-workers' HEADS OFF ... without going to jail
Carl Icahn broadcasts his $150bn Apple shakedown effort to world+dog
Thursday 24th October 2013 20:10 GMT
Re: Yup. Undervalued my backside.
Using your cash to buy back your shares already sends a bad signal to the investors. It means you have no clue what to do with the money. You are not planning to expand.
Apple makes very nice things, but there is a lot more that it can do. It has a kind-of cloud service that does not really live up to its name. It has a map service that is still playing catch-up. But Apple is not using its cash to try to make them better; it is paying a dividend instead. Google and Amazon would never do such a thing. As far as they are concerned, the sky is the limit and everything is invested for growth.
That is why using your cash to buy back your shares is a bad thing. Now, borrowing cash to buy back your shares is just plain stupid.
Anonymous and pals gather in support of girl at centre of rape case
The importance of complexity
Wednesday 23rd October 2013 17:57 GMT 
I've been asked to find the best way to distribute accounts on forms, considering each account needed to be signed off by a different set of people. I used the greedy algorithm, which was plenty good enough for the sizes involved. But it certainly was not optimal, and the problem is likely NP-hard. Did not bother to prove it though.
EDIT: it must be the subset cover problem, now that I think of it.
Wikipedia sockpuppetry probe puts a sock in hundreds of accounts
Internet Explorer 11 BREAKS Google, Outlook Web Access
Monday 21st October 2013 07:12 GMT
Re: "This post best viewed in Netscape Navigator..."
Considering the Google products have kept working fine not only in Chrome, but also Safari, Firefox and Opera, I'd tend to think that this is a bug in IE rather than a bug in Google products.
There was however definitely a hint of smugness in Google's way to tell Microsoft they were not allowed to create a native YouTube app for Windows devices, and that Google would not bother to write one themselves for such a small market share.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
