* Posts by Destroy All Monsters

16005 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2008

It's replicant Roy Batty's birthday – but hey, where's my killer robot?

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Re: Do androids wet dream of electric sheep?

They were wet-ware with wipe-dates, no silicon involved.

This is correct, but of course testing for this special makeup physically would have been easy-peasy. A drop of blood and check the DNA. Done! (Like the Gaius Baltar test which was not handled all to well in BSG at all).

The Philip K Dick novel's androids appear to have been a mix of robotic and organic bits.

Not that I know. They were, however, devoid of natural human reactions and empathy (psychopathic) and killing them was considered taking out the trash. Even Rachel was the most horribly sadistic and manipulative thing.

Jenkins issues code of conduct to keep rowdy automation fans in line

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Paris Hilton

You seem to be living in a sheltered world.

Boozing is unsafe at ‘any level’, thunders chief UK.gov quack

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"Wowsers" These people are called "Wowsers"

Learn something new every day thanks to Jimbo's Fortean Grabbag of Deep Knowledge

If you want a USB thumb drive wiped, try asking an arts student for help

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> block de-duplication

Wait, what?

USB sticks have block deduplication?

Really, now.

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Re: Actually

You don't need to worry about multiple overwrites to 'really' erase it per DOD standard any more than you need to write multiple times to RAM to erase it

Dude.

You needed to worry about multiple overwrites when disks were in the multi-megabyte size. Pretty sure there is paper about that floating around the Internet.

Good luck getting your STM microscope out to recover my once-zero data from remanent magnetic zones.

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Re: Sod thumbdrives

And there was me hoping for the noise of a good old fashioned head crash.

Please explain in 100 words or less why exactly you expected this to happen.

The sloth is coming! Quick, get MD5 out of our internet protocols

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Re: Perhaps what should have been mentioned is this:

8 sockpuppets are easy to engineer

'Wipe everything clean ... Join us ...' Creepy poem turns up in logs of 30 million-ish servers

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Windows

Don't you mean 20+ years?

(Obligatory sadfrog image)

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Paris Hilton

Follow the White Rabbit

burn up electricity and bandwidth on empty responses to spurious requests.

This coming from someone posting in El Reg Forums.

Qualcomm, Nvidia are driving us nuts – with silicon-brains-for-cars

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Paris Hilton

How about 250 trillion deep-fry dipping operations per second?

deep-learning operation

What a silly name. It tells us nothing.

Are those neural networks? I suppose the board is not meant to do inductive logic programming. Why does it need to learn? It's too late to learn, it has to fight now. Please, we need to know more.

Under-attack Linode resets passwords after logins leak onto web

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Re: Made a right old hash...

Stop spouting memes you don't understand.

Compuware promises mainframe DevOps as old programmers croak

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Facepalm

What the fuckety fuck am I even reading and what has any of this to with "Object Orientated" programming? Or even JavaScript?

COBOL is a tool. It is an unwieldy tool from back when machines had memory in KByte sizes and a single KHz CPU and three terminals, structured programming was starting to be considered a neat idea and when most everyone had no idea what adequate program syntax might look like, even less what types were (dependent, OO or otherwise) and how a compiler could check code. Time to retire the crap.

And if you program program your mainframe in assembler... well ...

Ready for DevOps? Time to brush up on The Office and practise 'culture'

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Paris Hilton

Re: ISO9000/9001

Good for hotel room management,

IT operations (and even development?) Not so much.

Even if quality gurus affirm otherwise (they wouldn't be gurus if they actually spent the time doing the stuff they are talking about though, they would just be another trash compactor maintenance person)

Microsoft's 200 million 'Windows 10' 'devices' include Lumias, Xboxes

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Holmes

Re: Maybe...

I suppose the damage caused elsewhere would come out of your pocket since you were the one who decided not to update to get the latest codebase?

We are reaching feudal levels of exploitation here.

"Didn't till the lord's land (which he so magnanimously bestowed on you) for free? You had the chance. Now PAY!"

SpaceX makes rocket science look easy: Falcon 9 passes tests

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Re: Needs a name

Wolfpack sounds nicer

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Paris Hilton

Re: How many times?

> Not bell curve

> Thumb down

Looks like some NASA engineer from the STS booster design team is here

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Re: Where did it land?

Yes that baby landed on Earth.

Webcast here

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Why ar they so sooty and what is that hairy stuff?

Ok, so they are burning kerosene, but temperatures are rather high, so why so much deposits? Plus, there are patches of material looking like Andromeda Strain on the engine bells. Doesn't most of that come from after the landing when the rocket cools down with lots of gases swirling around?

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Re: How many times?

I hope we are all familiar with the failure bell curve.

The idea that there is a bell curve in the failurerate/launchcount graph (for any given subset of devices) is an unwarranted assumption. Time will tell - if SpaceX takes off.

Outfit throws fit, hits FitBit's hit kit with writ (Apple also involved)

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Re: Always the same argument

Company X may well have looked at the research papers, thought "oh that's clever, how we we do the same thing in a slightly different way?".

Because reading research papers and making things in different ways is verboten in the "EVERYTHING BELONGS TO ME! MEEE!!" world of modern "business".

The whole house of cards of savage mendacity must come down. It just must.

Here's your Linux-booting PS4, says fail0verflow

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Thumb Down

Re: Wrong security model

where no manufacturer of anything is ever going to want to offer anyone the option to tinker for themselves ever again

Only in environments where the goal is to win a captive market, the initial hit is free, or nearly so, and the business model absolutely depends on a subsequent revenue stream from said captive market.

If your statement was true, there would be no PC games at all. Pointing at "freetardism" as the reason for disempowerment, hardware locking and suppressive legal manoeuvers is just setting up a strawman.

In the business model we have here "customers" are basically revenue cattle who have little control over what they "consume" and who accept the concomitant risks: security risks due to vulnerable cloud infrastructure and unfixed problems with their gear, risks of seeing their system being "discontinued" with no recourse at any time (possibly taking the "content" with it), risks of seeing their system destroyed or rendered inoperable as the "War on IP Infringement" rages and risks of getting few "add-ons", if not advertisements, that they do not want at their expense.

Luckily one can still chose to say "no" to this kind of bullshit, but seeing the utter disgrace that the "mobile device" market it, maybe not for much longer. Some people are ok for this, but then again, some people are okay for paying taxes for which they get shit healthcare and large mansions for parliamentarians. To each his own.

Got a Nexus? Google has five critical Android security fixes for you

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Paris Hilton

Re: patches

You seem to be one of the few person with superpowers able to actually assure us of the absence of (any further) bugs in "gated community for your convenience" Apple gear?

Or else your trolling is on 4chan level.

Riddle of cash-for-malware offer in new Raspberry Pi computers

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Re: Unnnnkkk!!

We dont kno dat

2016 in mobile: Visit a components mall in China... 30 min later, you're a manufacturer

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Holmes

China has piles of cash, which means huge capital splurges in all directions. Which has caused a global glut of stuff. Steel, aluminium, rubber ... and consumer electronics.

We are not off to an auspicious start:

China has piles of cash

No. China prints piles of cash. Not the same. China also has lots of Federal Reserve Notes, realistically called "paper with pretty pictures" (or else promises by the unborn US generation to pay things back eventually if one extends leftist thinking that we just 'owe it to ourselves')

China has pulled in the concrete and steel so far like no-one else

That particular bubble of malinvestments is now deflating and built-up overcapacity is showing itself.

This is what causes a global glut of steel and other stuff for constructions.

Inb4 "MUH INDUSTRIAL JOBS"

Wearables are perhaps the most obvious symptom of overproduction, because they remain a solution looking for a problem.

"Overproduction" does not exist as such, unless you have a company or a whole sector that wants to commit suicide quickly. Malinvestments due to easy cash, which is then sold by politicians and "economists" as "getting out of the recession" but is just another way to burn down the house while you smoke grass to keep calm, is, however, what we are looking at here.

Trustworthy x86 laptops? There is a way, says system-level security ace

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Holmes

Re: "legislation may come to the rescue."

Legislation will come to the rescue indeed.

I could imagine requirements for special hardware that must be able listen for unfiltered ISP-emitted packets not far in the future. To catch copyright infringers, of course.

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Thumb Down

> Absolutely ridiculous comment that shows a basic lack of knowledge.

If you say so, extremely skilled commentator.

> Without getting a microscope out and examining the 3D printed chip, how do you know that the 3D printer actually created exactly what you told it to?

What else would it have created? Does it have a library of everything printable and a specail rom with Evil Patches to apply on need? WTF?

But yeah, maybe you are in a virtual reality, who knows?

Forget anonymity, we can remember you wholesale with machine intel, hackers warned

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> Overall, my code is like nobody else's.

Code is for reading by other programmers.

Your work is utterly useless and if you have managers, they should remove themselves from the gene pool.

Probably needs a special Developer Darwin Award.

Dr Sue Black among handful of IT Brits getting New Year gongs

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I'm so tired

Is it the news or the Half-Life-2-setting-sun-atmosphere that pervades everything?

What did we learn today? Microsoft has patented the slider bar

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Holmes

Re: *Design* Patent

Microsoft does not have a patent on the concept of a slider, they have a patent for a particular *appearance* of a slider.

That this even exists is testament to the utter stupidity of the american art of "capitalism", which has nothing to do with actual capitalism but quite a lot with nepotism, protectionism and toll-boothing of everything that you can. The environment is extremely toxic. This is what you get when lawyers, bureaucrats and politicians dependent on slush money are given free reign.

This is a look and feel suit

There are actually people out there who think "a look and feel suit" makes sense. How about a "touch and hear" suit?

It is not a "software patent" and the EFF says as much. But the word "patent" is not in there for shits and giggles. The fact that a suit exists is testament to the fact that this a real "patent": it claims some kind of ownership.

Debian Linux founder Ian Murdock dead at 42

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Unhappy

Fuuuuuu....

Now I'm even more depressed.

This is not going well.

Upset Microsoft stashes hard drive encryption keys in OneDrive cloud?

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Re: Loaded guns

Please explain how a "license" is supposed to fix anything.

Maybe one needs a license to read books, because there is lots of dangerous and sexual stuff in there that could lead to emotional instability? Plus, it would bring in the monies and provide bureaucratic jobs.

North Korean operating system is a surveillance state's tour de force

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Re: Plain ASCII Text files

I didn't know 7-bit character files still existed?

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Paris Hilton

Derived from Fedora

So is this actually Hedorah Linux?

Good old writer Blair would be proud to have got everything so right here, except that MiniTruth is on people's desk, not only across town.

Crumbs! Stricken Kiev blames Russian hackers for Xmas eve outages

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Next: "Madame Nuland found crisp'd in shorted power line"

Seriously, Kiev?

For all we know, it might have been patriotic Nazis wanting to to get heard.

Oklahoma bloke cuffed for Chrimbo caprine coupling

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Trollface

The goat wanted it!

Lightly dressed in cashmere, was she?

China wants encryption cracked on demand because ... er, terrorism

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Big Brother

FBI dreams wistfully of Middle Kingdom's new antiterror law

...and I do hope that liberal gun laws will keep it that way.

(in the ancient sense of "liberal", not the minding-your-business for-your-own-good spending-your-money responsibility-to-protect genocidal controlfreak "liberals" of today)

Gaming souk Steam spews credit card, personal info in Xmas Day security meltdown

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Re: Steam's update

Good!

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> it's a minor privacy breach

Jesus Christ, the things one hears in 2015.

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"PROBABLY NOT A PROBLEM"

Where is Gordon Freeman when you need to break something?

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It's no use, you will now have to get a new credit card anyway because, how can you be sure?

It's an epic fuckup make no mistake and "1 year of free credit monitoring" won't cut it.

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You are not alone, DropBear.

Working from the office now...

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Flame

I hope they have cached up on legal insurance, because lawyers need to hit this one hard.

Microsoft in 2015: Mobile disasters, Windows 10 and heads in the clouds

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Re: The game is up Microsoft - your code is crap!

The VMS OS created to run on Dec Alpha CPUs.

LOLNO

BSD systems are true real UNIX systems.

Keeper of the flame, we shall....

No wait, this is just bait.

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Headmaster

What's it with the optimization?

Windows lost huge momentum as a result of the failure of Windows 8 and the shift in strategy back to a desktop-oriented operating system, rather than one optimized for touch and tablets.

Better choice: "adapted"

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Headmaster

"Investors" may think this or that but who cares?

Microsoft's problem is that it had the delusion that it could take over the world by hook or by crook (being powered by The Insufferable Ballmer for a long time didn't help) and roll over anything else out there. In parallel. With contraptions that were not even sure to work or appeal.

Then it found that the world is kinda vast and that people don't particularly care for the Microsoft brand, which has a distinct association with ... well, used carpets spring to mind.

It's like a hegemonic power deciding to retreat after a failed wintry Moscow expedition to concentrate on managing Europe instead.

Boffins unwrap bargain-basement processor that talks light and current

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Re: Sweet!

> assembly language OS GUIs

What

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Re: I wonder what the latency of this is?

Delay line memory is never obsolete as long as c < ∞

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Re: Shame about the paywall

More on publishing here, guys from ... 10 years ago. It's like it was yesterday. Now I am even more depressed.

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Well, you don't need to drive the off-chip signal lines with actual electric power, so it's both faster and more energy-efficient. Plus you can put the signal lines closer together (no worry about capacitance and cross talk) and maybe even go through-air (signalling from anywhere inside the CPU - not only from the edge of the CPU - to another CPU on top of it for example). We will see what comes out of this.