Posts by YARR
137 posts • joined Monday 24th November 2008 10:57 GMT
Re: ROVs ?
In all these years of human space walks, has it not occurred to anyone to use an ROV similar to deep-ocean explorers? It would avoid the risk of being hit by micrometeorites and could even be operated from Earth, freeing the 'nauts to continue their planned work schedule.
Re: Only 1/3?
Totally agree. The latest generation SSDs have 128Gb on a single chip. That will become baseline within 18 months. By 2017 they will be so cheap that most motherboards will probably have an SSD chip soldered directly as the boot device. The market for separate SSDs / hard drives connected via an I/O bus will be limited to those of us who have a media library that we wont entrust to the cloud.
Re: paid for by the suckers ...
If it wasn't worth it, they wouldn't pay it.
The real suckers are the workforce whose dedication and commitment create most of that value. The handful at the top leverage that value to award themselves fat bonuses and paychecks far beyond their own real worth. Ellison might be more deserving than the average exec given that he actually founded the company, but there's no way his earnings are in proportion to his own efforts. If corporations were democratic it wouldn't be this way.
Re: Unique watermark
Although this idea sounds very consumer-friendly, the potential exists for hackers to reverse engineer the process by examining multiple copies of the video obtained via different accounts. After that they can decode it and distribute the watermark-free version on bit-torrent. Or if they were particularly malevolent, watermark the video again to frame the innocent before distributing it.
Is it just me...
.... or do those graphs show the beginnings of a hard drive pricing cartel since the floods?
... and also
.. the default Windows 8 tiles colour scheme is just painful on the eyes. Bright green next to flourescent orange and purple - what were they thinking? Design and colourisation ain't my thing but whoever they paid to conceptualise the design must have been colour blind - or overruled. When the Apple design team first saw Windows 8 they must have had a quiet chuckle to themselves. Pastel shades perhaps, or different shades of the same colour, but more than two contrasting colours in close proximity is a recipe for a UI that will make you want to avert your gaze.
I'm sure you can customise it, but changing settings is beyond some users, may be locked down on controlled devices or just takes time people don't have. They should have picked a default scheme with universal appeal.
MS Surface strategy was wrong
Marketing's not my field, but IMO MS got the order of the slate / RT devices wrong. They should have released the full x86 Win 8 devices first. Even if there is a dearth of touch based apps initially, people would buy them because they are also fully working PCs. Then after a year or so, once the app store is established, release the cut-price RT devices to attract the lower end of the market to the platform - similar to the smaller cheaper IPad mini and 7" Android tablets.
By releasing the RT devices first with few apps available and costing more than non-RT equivalents, there was little incentive for anyone to buy them. MS might be able to recover from this if they stick with it for the long term, but personally I don't want Office on a tiny tablet so I wouldn't pay a premium for it.
So they're kicking themselves in the teeth?
"We're going to put our shoe leather where our mouth is," Chris Padilla,
Re: Tired of the lies @cybersaur
We are continually told there is a skills shortage, yet the salaries on offer in the IT sector are the lowest they've ever been in real terms, as stated in recent articles on this very site. The media report there is an oversupply of graduates and not enough new graduate positions to match, forcing many to take less skilled work.
I highly doubt there are 300,000 new jobs (that's how many visas they want) being created in America every year whose skill requirement is so high that no one in America is available and sufficiently skilled to do them. Some perhaps, but nothing like that number.
Secondly, it's highly suspect that people who just-so-happen to have exactly the right skills are available but only from abroad. How did they obtain these sought after skills that Americans lack? Are American companies leeching these skilled people from foreign companies by offering them higher salaries? If so, some day soon American companies may find they can no longer afford to compete, or may even be subject to a reverse brain-drain. If this happens, America will be forced to educate it's own people for these jobs, in order to stay competitive.
Are American companies reluctant to educate their own staff in these skills for fear of them leaving? If so, then America needs to emulate what other countries are doing, perhaps by reviewing the effectiveness of it's education system. If you have the most expensive degrees in the world, then you ought to be producing the best qualified workforce.
For low end or entry level IT work, the salaries at present in a India* are a fraction, perhaps 1/10th of the equivalent job in America*. For any job, whether low or high paid, if there are extra fees for employing an immigrant in America* plus the limited number of visas, why not create the job in India* to avoid those costs and complications? If these are genuinely new jobs, then no-one in America will lose their job as a consequence.
Finally, the way that the government submits to the wishes of industry lobby groups demonstrates a lack of democracy in their decision making. US politicians are elected by the people to represent the interests of the majority. I suspect that the interests of the majority of Americans has been ignored in this case.
* NB. Throughout my comment, you can generally substitute any "developed" nation for "America", and any "developing" nation for India, I don't intend to stigmatize any nation in particular.
Cut the lies - it's just pure naked corporate self-interest!
If you are a multinational company with a networked workforce, why do you need to import workers to the US, rather than employ them where they live? In many instances if would be cheaper to employ these talented people in their own country.
Is the real reason that you want to undercut the wage levels of workers in the US so that you can cream off even larger profits? Is compounding the issue of not hiring older workers really taking the US or the world "fwd" rather than backwards? Is robbing developing nations in particular of their talented young people going to aid the development of those countries?
"Zuckerberg argues that it's insanity to deport 40 per cent of non-US math and science students after paying for their education"
Seriously, why are US students subsidizing non-US students to attend their universities while "US schools" have a "critical lack of funding"? If they could cut the huge cost of degrees by 40% more Americans could afford to go to university and fill the apparent skills shortage. Also, they might accept lower salaries if their education costs were less, so you can make larger profits!
In what way do the "benefits of the inventions" currently only belong to the few, and how will undercutting US wages improve this alleged situation?
"It might seem odd that a nation largely populated by immigrants should feel so strongly about slamming down the gates".
Why does it seem odd? First nation Americans didn't welcome large numbers of new settlers to America. Historically, welcoming immigrants is the exception rather than the rule for most countries.
"Here in California the farming industry would collapse overnight if the flow of illegal workers was stopped, and it's unlikely that farmers could find enough locals to fill the back-breaking harvesting work without having to pay a lot more than current rates."
True, so illegal immigration is suppressing wages of Americans, and criminally exploiting illegal workers. If they were forced to pay higher wages, food would cost a higher % of family income like it used to, and there would be fewer obese Americans. The higher cost of farm laborers would stimulate investment in developing agricultural technology. This would have more practical benefit to society than time-wasting social networking sites that have to be ad supported because no-one is willing to pay for them. Does social networking boost American exports? Do ad-supported businesses grow the economy or simply feed off it, like lawyers?
"American firms are also unwilling to hire older workers over fears of crippling health care costs from insurance companies."
Ah, so discrimination is alive and well in the land of the free and home of the brave. Nothing is done about it though because it doesn't affect the interests of America's new elite ruling class.
Concentration camps
Why has Halliburton been paid over a billion to build all those concentration camps?
A: To accommodate millions of desperate, armed US citizens fleeing the first city targeted by a terrorist nuclear bomb.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1572769/
Re: This is the way to do it.
"Competing with locals is good."
Good for whom? Not for local people in the countries open to immigration, where local people have to accept lower status jobs as a consequence and have less opportunity to develop their skills. Whereas when people emigrate from a country they vacate opportunities to those further down the education/skills ladder.
"Would you rather ARM could hire the best coders in the world - even if they were American/Japanese/Korean - or be limited to Bert from Saffron Walden because you wouldn't want anyone coming from outside S Cambs and taking local jobs"
That's your opinion, just don't make the mistake of having brand loyalty to a globalist corporation thinking you're helping your own country's economy. If we apply your logic then we should expect 99%+ of global corporation employees to be non-British since we make up <1% of the world's population. If they choose to keep their offices here, then it looks like Bert from Saffron Walden will have seek employment abroad for less pay, or be consigned to a sink-estate living on benefits. Same thing will happen to the next generation of immigrant children until the world's economies are equalised, or a new equilibrium is reached whereby "Western" countries have sucked all the available talent out of the rest of the world in a desperate attempt to maintain their economic status, without a care for what impact this has on local people.
Not in my name...
Real wars are caused by disputes over territory, but what is the point of a cyberwar, except as part of a real war?
What gives any authority the right to write the rules of cyberwar and expect them to be binding for others? What if free and independent individuals decided to collaborate and write their own rules, for instance, declaring that any person or organisation who initiates cyberwar is the enemy of all free people?
Why should we as individuals support or accept any responsibility for the actions of others committing cyber attacks beyond our control, supposedly on behalf of our nation, or other nations to whom our governments are linked?
COBOL's days are numbered
What aspect of COBOL makes it maintainable? If the COBOL developers are retiring then the code base is at risk of no longer being maintained, just as spoken languages die out when there are no longer any speakers.
Teaching university students an archaic procedural language would fail to equip them with the considerably more demanding OO design and dev skills required for modern software. Modern applications are usually orders of magnitude more complex that what computers could handle back in the 1950s and 60s, so an OO approach to managing that complexity is a prerequisite.
The obvious solution is to run the source code for legacy COBOL software through auto translation tools into modern languages. Admittedly the output would be way below the code quality expected, but it would run and would work as a starting point.
I think they released this story to the press three weeks early.
RunCore
There's also RunCore. I reckon they should merge with EMC, to form...
Unlikely to happen...
Around the turn of the century, China announced a grand plan to reverse engineer Windows 98 and release a 100% compatible OS so they didn't have to pay royalties to Microsoft. What became of this? Instead they have developed a reputation as some of the most ardent hackers.
It's easier to hack into other people's code than it is to develop your own secure code.
Oxymoronic
Commiserations to anyone unfairly treated, including anyone who lost their job that didn't deserve to.
It has to be said... "zero tolerance for discrimination" is an oxymoron, unless it's legalese.
Why call it Curiosity....
... if you don't send it back to investigate?
Failing that, it should have had a couple baby rovers on board that could be dispatched on an observation-only side mission like this. With today's technology we ought to be able to design something very small using inexpensive, off the shelf components that could do this.
If they start testing now....
... they'll be able to catch some good thermals.
Re: cultural revolution - I don't think so
Quite a lot of people do pirate, but only because it's been easier and more convenient than paying. The idea that intellectual property is wrong doesn't hold up to the argument that all should have an equal right to profit from their labour, regardless of whether the product of their labour is of a physical or intangible form.
IMO the only reason the pirates have won any significant support at all is due to a few high profile cases where casual pirates have been sued for extortionate sums of money. If an effective and wide ranging piracy detection system can be employed so that every infringement is met with a bill coving the cost of the content plus a reasonable fine, most piracy will stop. Some piracy will probably continue for works which are not commercially available, or whose market is so small that there is no economic case for chasing after the pirates.
For those who accuse the industry of being fat cats, there are plenty of productive ways to challenge the situation. A crowdsource revolution could empower many more people to produce content, and undercut the existing industry, outdoing the so called fat cats by market forces. The same is happening in other industries, with fat cat bankers being steadily undermined by a system of peer to peer loans.
Posted in 2012: The year that netbooks DIED
Re: @Blitterbug @Kevin 6
"Funny you mention that where I worked at the time someone bought a Eee with ubuntu on it came in the next morning asking that Wheres the start menu question."
Then they're gonna be very confused if they "upgrade" to Windows 8 or use a Mac, iOS or Android.
Ignore them...
Anonymous might be able to shut down WBC's servers for a while, but they won't succeed at stopping their protests.
Given that WBC ignore rational argument (obviously there is no connection between homosexuality and the murder of innocent children), a better strategy might be for everyone to just ignore them. Just blank them at their protests, give them no media attention, don't sue them and eventually they may give up. This is the strategy that was adopted by the media after several terrorist groups in Iraq captured Westerners and threatened to behead them.
Another possibility is that the WBC could be agents trying to provoke a public outcry against themselves, working on behalf of forces who would like the law changed to curtail freedom of speech. The strategy of ignoring them would avoid falling into any such trap.
Posted in Cassini spots Titan ‘mini-Nile’
With all due respect to the team operating this...
... but why did it take 8.5 Earth-years of orbits to obtain these images?
Re: uhm...
I think he means searches from the browser search bar.
When installing IE8 + 9 (I've not seen IE10) the setup program lets you choose whether to enable 'SafeSearch' which blocks phishing sites before you view them. I'm sure Firefox does the same thing. For this to work it must either push an up to date phishing database inside the browser or send every URL you visit to Microsoft / Firefox / etc.
Posted in Six of the best Nintendo Wii U games
re. "dont forget that for the time being the Wii-u is the most powerful console"
Unless the IPC of the PPC core has increased by over 250% since the 360 was released, then the 1.2 GHz 3-core CPU is only 1/3 - 1/2 as powerful as a 3.3GHz 3-core 360, which will make porting some games challenging, despite the slightly better GPU.
Posted in America planned to NUKE THE MOON
Re: mentality of our friends from across the pond.
How the commies "saved us" from Uncle Sam....
- seized power without electoral mandate
- sadistically tortured political opponents to death
- forced their own citizens into slave labour camps in their millions but not admitting to it
- confiscated grain supplies from the peasantry and took away all their farm machinery so they starved to death in their millions (in the name of Collectivisation)
- forced their soldiers to advance or take a bullet in the back of the head (the Nazis never treated their troops this way), then encouraging mass rape of the women in occupied lands
- building walls and border fences to prevent people escaping rather than invading
- imprisoned the head of their rocket programme for political reasons (countless other less fortunate high profile persons were executed)
- building more nukes and subs than NATO
- building ever more powerful nukes while the US made their Minutemans smaller with improved targeting
- installing puppet governments in surrounding nations
- covertly supported communist takeovers in developing nations across the globe, again involving numerous executions and disappearances of political opponents
- infiltrating the West and using subversion to brainwash a generation of academics, students and the future educators and political class into self-hating, unpatriotic commie-loving traitors.
But you're right, nuking the moon would just have been a step too far!!!!
Result of galaxy collision?
What if two smaller galaxies rotating in the same plane collided with each other? Couldn't that mutually feed a lot of mass into the black holes at each other's centres before coalescing into one galaxy?
"Sun" RISC
Anyone else notice that the "Sun RISC" screen shots for 1987 in the first video were of the RISC OS 3 desktop on an Acorn Archimedes?
Re: Not just MI6, the police are looking for a killer as well...
I applied.... but apparently it wasn't a job.
What a farce...
I thought this sort of thing only happened when British companies tried to take over American ones.
Re: Yarr, we'll split the booty.
Aye to that.
So the IT angle is...
... it involves something digit-al.
Relatively massive
2.5x the mass of our Sun is not massive on the Main Sequence. Stars can be 10s to 100s of times more massive than our Sun, but they burn out faster. It's just at the upper end of the scale for stars with orbiting planets.
With a name like that...
... no wonder it bombed!
NeXT over iMac?
The iMac is a strange omission given that the original Mac and NeXT cube were relative product failures.
Re: Anyone suprised?
Theoretically yes, but the evidence suggests otherwise. The perpetrators would appear to come from a communist country, and counterfeit components have historically been less of a problem when manufacturing was done in capitalist countries.
With £1.8bn...
... you could buy an internet connected spycam for every home in the country. Then stage one more fake terrorist attack as an excuse to pass legislation making them compulsory....
Something completely different...
Platform for Launching Enterprise Bytecode Images Across Networked Servers (P.L.E.B.I.A.N.S.) anyone?
MASS-ive overkill
The idea of moving something to a Lagrange point to block the sunlight is within reason, but moving the mass of an asteroid there is massive overkill!
By the time such a project were likely to reach fruition, technology should have advanced enough that we will be able to send molecular assembly robots there to collect space dust and re-arrange it into some kind of thread structure, then weave it into sheets thick enough to block sunlight. This way the sunlight can be blocked using far less mass. Admittedly we'd need a whole fleet of robots doing this in order to construct something of sufficient size in the timescale required.
A sheet would act as a solar sail and would be easily displaced, necessitating something like ion-drive shepherds to continually re-position it. The incident solar energy could be collected and used to power the ion-drives.
Canny business move for Google right now....
Introduce a Google Maps app for £499 that comes with an up-to £499 rebate when you trade-in your iPhone for an Android phone, plus on maps.google.com detect if the browser user agent identifies as an i-device, then display the message "Sorry, a flash plugin is required to view this content".
Irrelevant - that's why
RE "The 47-year old far-right sympathizer has funded racist and extremist groups in Sweden – a fact coyly ignored by copyright activists and Pirate Bay supporters"
Just what are you suggesting Mr. Orlowski, should he receive a harsher sentence for piracy because he has a particular opinion in an unrelated area that you'd like to thought criminalise? Must fellow pirates feel compelled to distance themselves from him over this unrelated issue, sparking dissent in their ranks which is precisely the goal of their anti-piracy opponents? Any group that attempts to unite people around one issue will have a diversity of opinion in all unrelated areas.
This fact is not "coyly ignored", it is ignored because it is irrelevant. If you believe otherwise then please present some evidence showing a correlation, or better still, a causal link between one set of political views and the likelihood of committing or supporting piracy. In the absence of such evidence then we must assume there is no correlation.
"Extremist" is a relative word. Many opinions now classed as extremist by those who wish to corral or claim to represent "public opinion" were once foundational beliefs of societies past. Historically most societies have valued what differentiates them from other societies over what they have in common with each other.
Posted in Even slimmer PS3 out next week
Top loader and no price cut?
Did they economise this by making it a top-loader rather than a tray-loader, which makes it less practical as a blu ray player under a telly - not to mention a PITA for swapping game discs?
This cut-down PS3 ought to come with a cut-down price tag, after all the 360 was about the same price nearly 5 years ago!
Big Brother's Fabian deception strategy
In the real world people don't walk around with name tags on all the time or with an ID number tattooed across their forehead, so why should we submit to this form of oppression online?
If we can go to a public place and express our views to anyone who will listen without being identified, tracked and potentially discriminated against forever after, the same right to anonymity should exist online.
Niemals kapitulieren to Big Brother, even if he bears a deceptive "don't do evil" charade.
And no LinkOfHyrule, expressing racist or homophobic opinions is not trolling, it's freedom. Get over it.
It's not evil when we say so.
Cultural imperialism is not evil. True or false?
Who will defend the right of children to be raised in a natural family?
Will Google and Bing defend equally vigorously the rights of those individuals unfortunate enough to have been born with a predilection to paedophilia, bestiality or necrophilia?
Rogue-nation head of state
Best not fit those warheads with A.I., else when they target them at a "rogue-nation head of state" it will turn back and land on the White house.
Genuine question about evolution
On the subject of evolution v creationism, I have a question about evolution for the well-informed reg readership if anyone is reading this.....
If a species by definition cannot reproduce with other species, and it takes 1 male + 1 female of the same species to reproduce, how do new species come into existence and preserve themselves?
I thought evolutionary theory implies that changes in DNA occur due to random mutations, and that very occasionally that random mutation would create a new species that can't reproduce with it's parent species.
Therefore, to create new species, the same very improbable mutation has to occur in both a male and female offspring living in the same vicinity and same lifetime. How likely is that?
Re: Nights_are_Long
Your statements are nonsensical and provide no rational argument for the opinion you express.
"I am a Federalist as it is the only way forward"
Forward to what, to what destination are you heading? I am a Nationalist, and the purpose of a National government is to run it's National services. I see no reason why the individual governments of the nations of Europe are in any way disadvantaged at achieving that task due to their present size.
"we have a great past but now we are a small wet rock of the Coast of Europe"
Insults aside, I assume your point is that our economic position in the world is declining, because other world economies are catching up with our level of development? Well so is the relative economic position of the whole of Europe for the same reason. What does this matter? Provided we maintain a healthy per-capita standard of living and keep out of debt, I have no problem with the rest of the world catching up. The EU will make no difference to this.
"and the way forward is unification or we stand alone and fall."
How is standing alone, i.e. independence not a "way forward"? How is a world of independent nations representing the different wishes of different peoples not a workable model for the future of the world? How will preserving national governments which bring democracy closer to us as individuals cause us to "fall" in any way? Smaller democracies make it easier for us as individuals to effect change. To effect change in a large country like the US you need lots of money. A small country like Iceland, can quickly throw out a corporate-controlled government by one which says to the global bankers "no we will not take on your private debts as out national debt".
