Posts by Tom 38

Re: Oh for a steam roller..

Have you read the precis for the "Developer" track at this conference? Developers who are passionate about coding would not be attending this, it is all fluff no stuff. I'm sure it would be a great place to network, make contacts, get an internship as a "digital research assistant", but personally I'd rather be coding than spend time in "Developer 101" sessions. Here's a few gems:

"Ben currently runs European Marketing for cloud-communications startup Twilio. He will talk about the importance of seeing the world as a ‘software person’ and how we are halfway there" - Welcome to the "developer" track.

Keith is an award-winning mobile application developer. He will explain the first steps of iOS development in order to get to app store as an Apple OS developer - crikey, all that secret information - oh no, that's all on the ADC.

To Infinity And Beyond - The Story Of An Infinite Scroll with Liz Rice - wonder what Liz will talk about in the other 59 minutes of the talk.

Putting the entire slam on the "Developer" track is the description of it:

Creating a world out of ones and zeros, developers are the architects and designers of our online arenas. We will present the opportunity for coders and designers to gain skills from expert tutors in some of the world’s most renowned platforms, such as HTML5 and Javascript, as well as the chance to exercise their own talents. What is more, it will be possible to understand how anyone could learn the methods and skills needed to create these web-environments for themselves and thereby, essentially, build your own opportunities. This isn't an opportunity you can pass up.

So there you have it, this isn't an event for developers, it's an event for media/marketing types to dabble a bit in programming and "entrepreneur" their ridiculous ideas without involving actual developers.

Numpty, I think you've missed the joke.

Re: who says "Ninty"?

Never heard 'Ninty' before, surely the abbreviation is 'tendo? Certainly we used to refer to 'tendo 64.

Yep, I was all like "wooo!", and then quickly realized that France Telecom/Orange would evidently not be one of the co-operating operators. Get it in France, PDQ please, and I'll easily convince the rest of my family to join me on Three.

Three is magic. OK, there are on occasions times when you will get no signal at all, but they will be very very rare. More often than not, particularly if you live/travel in rural areas, your phone/tablet will have lovely 3G, and your friends on O2, Vodafone and Orange have close to nothing. I spent the bank holiday weekend in a field in Norfolk, streaming the cricket over 3G to my tablet - no-one else in our field could even send a text without walking half a mile.

Re: Come on....

Or is pointing out the absurdity of their funding model news worthy?

Re: Fanbois vs. Troll authors - jeez, grow up

(I have 3 Windows devices, 3 Android devices, and 3 Apple devices, it just so happens)

Do you juggle them or something?

Re: Not that daft

There is no evidence he had any secret or encrypted documents or that he handed over any password other than the login for his PC and PIN for his phone.

Actually we do. The QC for the government said this in court today:

Material taken from the claimant includes material the unauthorised disclosure of which would endanger national security of the UK and put lives at risk.

Hundreds of dead dolphins? NOAA says that it is an infection of morbillivirus.

However, the thing you are really missing is that "Mainstream media" do want this covered. The BBC has an "independent consultant" who is saying things like:

"The quantities of water they are dealing with are absolutely gigantic, What is the worse is the water leakage everywhere else - not just from the tanks. It is leaking out from the basements, it is leaking out from the cracks all over the place. Nobody can measure that.

Apart from him, clearly, who has measured it as "absolutely gigantic".

"It is much worse than we have been led to believe, much worse,"

"The Japanese have a problem asking for help. It is a big mistake; they badly need it." aka "Why haven't I been contracted yet".

Re: No....

You can't say that leaking classified documents is always wrong. There have to be times when leaking classified documents is right.....for instance when containing evidence of grievous crimes. After all, many of these documents were only classified in the first place to hide the wholesale breaking of laws, the Geneva convention etc. going on, so making it impossible to reveal classified documents for any reason just gives them a simple and easy way of hiding crimes.

I expect the judge may have agreed with you, if that is what he leaked. He didn't do this, he leaked as much of everything that he could, and trusted Assange to filter out what is sensitive, like names of translators working for the military, from what is 'newsworthy', like video of civilians being massacred.

Manning's job for his country was to protect that sensitive information from being disclosed, which he really failed at.

A good number of iPhone users see themselves as classy, educated and simply better because they have chosen a material object that they perceive as better - Apple products.

It's funny, because a lot of Android users see themselves as classy, educated and simply better because they haven't bought an iPhone. What's the difference?

Re: They do this everywhere

I recall back from the dawn of the internet a Netscape engineer post AOL takeover who had a script at login that would tell him how much his shares were worth, and how long he had to keep working for AOL before he could cash them in.

So where's your proof that prior to the NSA related leaks that you, or anyone you know, was having their email intercepted?

Well, my proof is that the security services in Britain have routinely been listening in to the worlds communications ever since world communications were invented (and largely routed through the UK). It is no coincidence that GCHQ have an outpost in Bude where a lot of the transatlantic internet (and before that, telegraph) cables come ashore. Here's a quote from a book on this topic:

Additionally, it read all cable traffic entering and leaving Britain. At first, this was arranged on a private basis. At the time, there were only three cable companies operating in Britain: C&W, which was owned by the British government so presented no problem, and the two American cable companies, the Commercial Cable Postal Telegraph Company and Western Union, who did not acquiesce so easily. The tacit threat of having their operating licenses removed was required before they agreed to cooperate with GCCS and and let it see their messages each day.

In December 1920, during a US Senate Sub-Committee hearing … one of the cable companies publicly revealed the duress under which it had been placed by the British Government. Acutely embarrassed by this unexpected disclosure, the British government hastily added a clause to the 1911 Official Secrets Act giving it the right to see copies of all cables if an emergency existed. (excerpt from The Intelligence Game by James Rusbridger)

This stuff has always gone on. With optical cables being trivial to tap and email being trivial to intercept from a tapped feed, what kind of naïf must you be to consider that the security services aren't looking at them?

Re: So held for about 28:50 longer than needed to copy his personal data I guess

Yeah, but he's not just a "friend" of the journo (I think you're teeheeing around the fact that - omg - he's a gay man with a bf), his boyfriend is the journo behind releasing of Five-Eyes classified material, and he is in transit from a meeting with Snowden's assistant, on his way to meet with his boyfriend, the whole trip being paid for by the newspaper that is publishing this material. He could very well have been travelling with material that is classified in the UK.

When you put it like that, they would be remiss in not taking the opportunity to examine anything he can store digital data on.

Re: Wow

I run FreeBSD on a box with uEFI, I didn't even know it had uEFI until I came to flash a device's firmware to the latest version, at which point it failed, because the machine has no fucking BIOS.

3 days of swearing later, I had the firmware updated, via a loaner mobo that had the required slots and still had a BIOS. I'm so glad they took away that nasty slow simple BIOS and replaced it with that nasty slow complicated uEFI.

Re: They don't want to give away extended support

Do you know how many times you've posted on this single thread? We get it, you <3 Microsoft, you want us to read your blog (I'm sorry, Microsoft's blog).

El Reg has this wonderful feature where by I can click on your name and see a history of your posts. You only talk on MS topics and you are only (overwhelmingly) pro MS. You're determined and professional in your comment carpet bombing campaign. I think it is about time those nice guys at Redmond sent you a Surface Pro to "review".

Re: Distracted driving

And I took a taxi about 8 years ago, and the driver READ A PAPERBACK pretty much the entire time she was driving. No tip for her.

Would you have preferred a hardback?

People like to diss Volvo because the cars look a little boxy and easily go for 200k+ miles (family record, 344k miles, after which it was sold as a taxi, still running). Much better to look cool and be scrapyard material before 100k miles.

Re: Not just football

CPL is also on BT Sports too, meaning I cant watch The Mighty¹ (St Lucia) Zouks on "We <3 Cricket" Sky.

¹ They totally missed a trick there - I'm sure Disney wouldn't have sued them much.

Re: Grounds for prosecution of the Premier League

Ah yes, but this would be "Not in the Public Interest", so no suey-suey.

Re: @Richard Jones 1 (was: Whatever. Show me the fucking "terrorists" already.)

I also asked on the next obvious problem of knives. At what age do we teach kids about these things? Or do we take the children for their own protection again? At what point do we teach them the right way to use any tools?

The right way to use a gun is to ask a policeman or soldier to do it for you. Welcome to civilization.

Re: Sir

I think, but am not 100% certain, that feature came in Star Fox 64, the version for the N64, which incidentally introduced the (hated) rumble pack to the world.

Re: Microkernels

I thought microkernel architecture was largely discredited, due to poor performance.

Yes, microkernels are essentially daft, and result in too much inefficiency. However, almost every Linux distribution now uses pulseaudio, a user space audio daemon, which is essentially performing the function of an audio subsystem in a hybrid or microkernel.

Re: Yeah, good luck.

I rode it last year. IIRC it did 450kph (there's a digital speed display inside) and what surprised me most : it was dam noisy, it rattled like an old style tube train! It didn't seem that fast from the inside, until the other train passes at the hallway point : blink and you'll miss it.

I didn't like the sections where the maglev banked quite viciously to the right. There is something disconcerting travelling above 400 kph, at an angle, looking down at the dismantled shanty town below.

Well worth a ride though. I wouldn't go to Shanghai just to ride the maglev, but if you are in the area it is a damn good experience. Interestingly, maglev is too expensive for China, I don't think they intend to build more maglev lines.

Re: @ Gilgamoth

Bayliss got fucked over for almost every single one of his inventions, can hardly blame the guy for wanting to get some protection.