Posts by Rippy
64 posts • joined Saturday 10th November 2007 02:47 GMT
Re: Bonk Cards
Sir Robin,
On Wednesday the CBC had a report of using a Galaxy S3 and a free app from Google Play to clone NFC card info:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/story/2013/04/23/mb-smartphones-skimmer-credit-card-winnipeg.html
G.
Attempts to take over internet 'egregious'
It's egregious because that's Google's job.
Beautiful language!
"Dematerialisation" is an exquisite choice to describe freeing the Word from the crass bonds of the physical world so it can range freely in the aether!
> Digitisation might be a better translation of the Italian word that gave rise to dematerialisation.
How very British to prefer to speak of "giving it the finger".
G.
Posted in Dotcom plans Mega IPO as case grinds on
Re: Welcome to the new order
> We in the west no longer have the moral high ground in terms of human rights.
Ok, I'll bite. Who does?
As summarized, the proposal sounds rather good ...
and therefore it will be a foggy day in hell before we get anything like it in Canada.
G.
"Over 90 per cent of passenger casualties come in the first and the last five minutes of flight ..."
Well, duh.
A B737 is around 96' long and flies typically at 250kts. That makes its crumpletime when it flies into a mountain under 227msec, which is much less than 5 minutes.
G.
@ "after that misleading headline"
The headline is pure onomatopoeia and not misleading at all; the sound of a Canadian robin breaking its neck on a large picture window is definitely "bonk".
The bird-feeder explanation, though, is improbable. I've been overfeeding birds in my back yard (north of Edmonton) for decades and never had a bird crash at the back, while they regularly bonk into the big front window. The difference is that when they come in to the front fast and low they can see clear blue sky reflected back to them and figure they can go on forever.
Setting the windows to slant down and in, like an airport tower, would be better for the birds (and reduce window washing), but that would look a little too geeky even for me.
G.
Re: So ripping off MINIX and giving it away for free counts as "innovation" now?
Linus "ripped off" MINIX? Wisdom sourced from Ken Brown's "Samizdat" perhaps?
See http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/brown/ for Dr. Tannenbaum's response to that drivel.
"As I soon learned, Brown is not the sharpest knife in the drawer."
G.
Makes sense but doesn't improve communication
Back in the dark ages -- late '80s I think -- a buddy of mine touring a plant under construction spotted an instrument mechanic tearing apart a monitoring device. Since my buddy's team was doing the data communication and processing that would be slurping the gadget's output he went over and asked "what's wrong?"
And received the answer "This fucking fucker's fucked."
Beautiful! a sentence that hit the gong in three out of four words and transmitted exactly zero information since the very fact he was disassembling it suggested it might be broken.
Re: Re: Related to ongoing contracts that are late and run on AIX 5.3 perhaps
PXG may be excessively modern in his liberal use of apostrophes, but he is absolutely correct in pointing out the oxymoron in Program Temporary Fix: they're as temporary as income tax. The original idea when the terminology was coined back in the last century was that they were temporary patches; now they're universally acknowledged as lasting until hell freezes over.
Re: It's great here - eh
I knew about the Egyptian connection, but Chinese?
@AC 21:01 - Gun Control Law
That one is /not/ a Gun Control Law, but a "long-gun" (rifle and shotgun) registration law. It's not particularly onerous; our hand-gun laws are far worse. I wasn't at all uncomfortable registering my old Lee-Enfield.
What was wrong with the long-gun registry was the political theatre that got wrapped around it; it was presented as protecting Good City Folks (particularly from Ontario) from crazed Hunters and Farmers (particularly from Oilberta), and oddly enough rural folk didn't much care to be stigmatised.
The Conservatives used the evil registry to crank up their base in the election and haven't had the courage to ditch the rhetoric.
Please, Alain
No-one can stop it ... that'd be racist.
G.
Reason
Not to be pedantic, but Sony hasn't provided a rationale.
Product differentiation seems a plausible reason, but here's a more likely one: it allows them to be more friendly to individual nanny-states who want to micromanage communications with their people. And that seems to be spreading: Think Of The Children (English-speaking world), Thou Shalt Not Criticize The Elite (France), The State Is A Perfect Shining Diamond (China and its many imitators), Muhammad Is The Perfect Prophet And My Interpretation Is The Only Right One ...
These rulers are comfortable with their ability to manage physical things like a game on a DVD but are still struggling with those insubordinate electrons.
G.
Harrumph
"The latest version of iTunes requests update URLs over a secure (https) connection, thereby blocking man-in-the-middle attacks."
Unless, of course, a friendly CA is assisting the investigation.
G.
New face of law enforcement?
Newsman Conrad "Tubby" Black has remarked that his gaolers were fascinated by his colorectal health too.
How short?
must I be to be ineligible for gaol time?
Just askin', won't follow the links.
Solomon Grundy is clearly too thin to do time.
Huh? how do you get offended here?
Even to a prudish Canajun, it seems silly rather than offensive. What's The Fuss?
G.
Curious ...
I'm curious just how long the fallible human was at the controls of the Googlebus.
Was it, perchance, less than 5 seconds while the fleshy computer tried to retrieve the situation after the silicon one stuffed up?
Just a thought.
G.
The devil has tainted the sneak preview ...
it's an incomprehensible mess if Javascript is turned off.
Posted in Can Big Blue survive another century?
@Don, cannot write an operating system?
> They are an enemy of Microsoft, and like every other organization that cannot write an operating system themselves, they ported UNIX.
I'm afraid you're showing your limited background there. IBM wrote, from scratch, rather a lot of operating systems back when operating systems were terra incognita (and their purpose and functions still being defined) and it gave them away up to 1980 or so, in source code (assembler), under the rubric of "Systems Control Programs (SCP) -- necessary to make the hardware work", since they were a hardware company.
I agree it's unfortunate that the one that had legs was OS/360 VS2 (which morphed into MVS or whatever it's called nowadays) -- VM/370 CMS was much more fun and was the first "Personal Computing" experience for many employees of large organisations (at least, of large organisations that weren't engineering firms).
G.
The data vampires
would just love to get a path to your tax data. And your land registry data. And ...
Are there any nice Luddite responses ?
Fairly Technical?
> The manual fix was only "fairly technical" because most of the instructions involved finding a file that Microsoft doesn't want you to see.
Of course not, silly boy. If you could see it, you might change it and corrupt the application.
That's our job.
Posted in Unisys revs up big ClearPath mainframes
Civil Service Imperatives
> However, Unisys sells a lot of its mainframes to federal and state governments, and among these customers, budgets are set and they don't care a whit about utility pricing even if it might save money. (Your tax dollars, pounds, and euros at rest.)
Please be a little more charitable to your hard-working public employees. The guys and gals putting together the recommendation will *never* be rewarded for proposing an efficient solution that involves an uncertain cost -- that's gambling, innit?
G.
Actually, Rombizio,
Any default, like abstaining or spoiling a ballot, helps keep the current crooks in power.
When all the choices are bad (and in Canada's election, yes, they are all bad), just hold your nose and vote for whichever of the out-of-power crooks has the best chance of turfing out the in-power crooks.
The resulting shakeup slows down the crooks: it takes the new ones a while to get their snouts into the trough, and we briefly have slightly better government.
Canada's current crooks are really unhappy with not having a majority. Minority government makes it so much harder to get all the way into the trough.
Vigorous moderation
25% of posts "deleted by moderator"?
Is this one frothing commentard or a real hot-button issue?
G.
Re: One-shot botnets
> Or are they hoping people will "just" reinstall everything?
Interesting idea. A reinstall will certainly do another, more thorough pass at covering tracks. And outside the enterprise environment, it's likely to cause regression in security patches, making the box vulnerable to other/more herders -- more track covering?
G.
Posted in Egypt switches off the internet
Once Again, The Register's Prescience is Confirmed
and Hosni Mubarak is clearly a visionary leader. He's just showing that "meatspace rules rule" and moving his country to the "closed network" that El Reg's Bill Thompson advocated in his great polemic of 2002: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/08/09/damn_the_constitution_europe_must/
Merry Christmas to all
And to all a good night.
Posted in Amazon randomly censoring incest books
Was it Animal Farm or 1984?
that Amazon first retracted from the Kindle?
I thought that after that incident all the Reg crowd quickly figured out that this might not be a very good analog of a physical book.
G.
Posted in Group slams airport naked body scanners
Re: So how do they find...
> ...a passenger with a Semtex suppository in place then?
By looking for the detonator.
G.
Posted in Group slams airport naked body scanners
It's not nudity ...
any more than the NASA's beautiful false-colour pictures of galaxies are photographs.
And you do not loose any virtue or reputation from having the drooling 'tards look at it.
And yes, it doesn't do anything useful for security, but for heaven's sake let go. The scanners are a way for the "we're all going to die" establishment to back off without loosing face; if we object strongly, they'll have to find something more obnoxious.
G.
HR Violation
This seems a little much from the rag that's been banging on about the Rise of the Machines since 2003 and coined the initialism "RoTM" in 2006.
If I thought you were serious, I'd have you up before the European Court of Human Rights for hate speech: the fruitcake is one of the high points of British culinary art and really doesn't deserve the abuse its getting these days.
---
Paris, because she's better looking than the other icons. Especially Prof. Sharkey.
Posted in Why is IBM declaring war on Cisco?
For only three decades?
> "IBM has been building multi-processor systems for three decades, ..."
It must be advanced senility; I was sure the S360/67, from the late '60s, was a multi.
Posted in Czechs toast Bud-beating beer win
Monty Python? I doubt it.
I think Monty Python is unlikely to be the origin of the "love in a canoe" simile since I'm sure that I heard it in Western Canada sometime in the late '50s or early '60s.
Not that I would disparage that fine group -- I couldn't possibly, not after Mr. Cleese announced "Michael, you're no longer the funniest Palin".
G.
The owner is human and believes he's in charge
> Off is off.
Really? like your desktop system, where pressing the "Off" button is a servile petition to the god-like operating system to stand down and take a rest if it's not too inconvenient, shutting down the hardware in the process? That becomes slightly more urgent if you hold it down for ten seconds?
And your TV, if it's new enough to use integrated circuits, only goes into "standby", not off. Off is when you pull the power cord.
G.
Strathclyde Police with a Banner Ad Module?
Who or what would advertise on a police website? bail bondsmen? Taser?
Surely "Liberty or Death"?
Sounds to me like Stallman proclaimed "Give GnuGo liberty or give it death" and The Steve responded "OK, hand me the ax".
Cool!
But ... sharing came with 3.11, aka WFWG, didn't it?
Enough quibbling! now I can run all that wonderful Classic Win software! like ... give me a moment ... like minesweeper!
G.
Without being completely compliance-based?
She's drowning in data, and wants to GIS tag it all before giving up control on usage?
Sounds like it's the Data Protection laws she's trying to avoid complying with.
G.
@ The 1st Dave
"So, exactly how useful is it to pump electricity _into_ the grid when no-one needs it, and pull electricity _out_ when everyone else is doing the same?"
I can't speak for England, but in Canada the times when solar power generation is possible are also the times of maximum consumption for industrial and office needs. We haven't seen a Solar Surplus yet in Alberta, so it's pure virtue.
G.
NET Zero is reasonably attainable
in Edmonton (lat 53degrees, just short of Edinburgh but in the Canadian prairies where it gets seriously cold in the winter) it's a reasonable goal to do NET zero ENERGY, but not off-grid: during the summer, generate enough solar and pump it back onto the electric grid to make up for what you draw for appliances and winter heating.
Mind you, it's not for the faint of heart. It takes serious insulation and attention to all efficiencies, and depends on local regulations allowing you to sell electricity back on to the grid.
See http://www.riverdalenetzero.ca/ and follow the links to the engineers that can actually deliver the goods.
G.
Posted in Man of God backs Beverley porncoder
@Ah yes, journalistic license.
Wouldn't that be journalistic licentiousness?
Who is she, anyway?
The eeePC model that is ... she has become so iconic to the industry (or at least to ElReg readers) that we really need to know her name to properly honour her.
G.
WTF?
Why The Fuss?
Whatever do dodgy entertainment pics have to do with financial rectitude?
Or am I being a naive colonial, and everyone else understands that this is yet another Auditor General who's taken his job seriously and Those That Count have decided to shoot the messenger?
Wasn't that a Nero Wolfe novel?
Instead of Evidence, maybe? it's a long time ago. Serious, military-class exploding cigar.
Tombstone, just because.
G.
Posted in Google suggests Islam is nothing
Try Mohammed is .. and Allah is ...
Mohammed -- silence
Allah is -- lots, starting with "Allah is great", "Allah is great in arabic", and "Allah is satan".
So yes, it is intentional code and yes, it has bugs in it.
G.
Consider the source
"France-headquartered defence giant Thales" - it really does look like something from the defense industries.
Serious. Solid. Absolutely minimal function. Butt-ugly.
When Sarko calls it "beautiful" he must mean that in some abstract spiritual way.
Paris, because I'd rather look at her than at Sarko. Or his phone.
G.
What's The Fuss?
Body modesty has always been about behaviour in a potentially courting situation, and just plain doesn't apply here.
Perhaps a sop to the prissy would be to staff these devices only with certified eunuchs? Before you giggle too much, there's a fair supply of older, functional eunuchs from subjects of radical prostatectomy, older guys who sacrificed their manhood rather than die of cancer.
G.
Virtualisation started where?
Martin, I have troubles seeing the IBM 360/67 with its 256K core boxes the size of a bus as a "desktop", and I'm pretty sure the other platforms virtualisation was developed on were also considered "shared" rather that "personal" computers.
