Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward
2956 posts • joined Thursday 31st December 2009 17:37 GMT
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Re: That's all very well...
Since 97% of the medals came from public school kids that probably isn't a problem.
As long as Eton continues with double dressage on a monday, and the royal family keeps squeezing out sprogs that look like horses the future is guaranteed,
Re: Geo exporting
They do, in the same way that Quebec exports cheap hydroelectric - in the form of Aluminium.
Ship in Auminium oxide, apply shitloads of electric, ship out Aluminium
Re: I've yet to meet a green protester
If living in Houston means you need outdoors AC for the barbecue on the patio then you either need to make fusion work or change your lifestyle.
That's just the sort of cynical attitude that is letting our Olympic team down.
You just have to look at the number of Golds for forward-roll and rope climbing.
Did any of the competitors have to do it in their pants because they had forgotten their kit?
Re: That'll be because
Odd really when a consortium of the big-4 govt IT contractors all collaborated to make this site usable by SMEs
Re: Dame(d)
I wouldn't mind being Helen Mirren-ed !
Military Inteligence at it's best
"Sir Bernard said: "I think I should have been prevented from going to to the Soviet Union because they obviously knew we had been used as a defence centre."
I wasn't allowed to go to a Pink Floyd concert in Berlin in 1990 - a year AFTER the wall came down, because I would lose my security clearance for a very boring project making a telescope to track satellites. And they let a top radio and radar expert go to Moscow at the height of the cold war?????
ps of course it's always possible the vetting people were unaware of the cold war and wouldn't let me go to Berlin in case I let slip the details of our plans at Waterloo.
Posted in Why women won't apply for IT jobs
Re: I must of missed
Sorry - didn't really make my point clear. It wasn't the women that were the problem - it was the policy.
So the government will decide we need more women in IT. Universities will be "incentivized" to get more women through it's programs. The only incentive universities have is entrance requirements and pass marks, so these will be adjusted to get 50% of women passing.
Similarly the govt can't do anything to make private companies hire women, but it can insist that govt IT jobs or govt IT contracts are 50% women.
The result of this is unlikely to be a rise in the status of women in IT !
Posted in Why women won't apply for IT jobs
Re: I must of missed
Fortunately the previous set of "Women in IT" just retired.
Working on a govt contract with an anonymous British AerospacE company was a bit surprised that more than half the programmers on a pretty technical/nerdy satellite tracking project were women, and most were 50+.
Talking to some of them the history was. They were working for Gec/Marconi/Honeywell in the late 70s/early 80s when somebody decided there needed to be more women in IT. Programming is just typing right, so they "retrained" the secretaries as programmers. Some were good, and would have been good SW engineers if they had the opportunities at the time - the others ? Well suppose you took some typists, gave them a couple of week course on Fortran 77 and then put them in a govt job where they could never be fired......
Re: pre-watershed....
Is that a sonic screwdriver in your pocket - or are you just pleased to see me ?
Re: Time for tubby bye byes...
Funnily enough the only British bank that hasn't managed to piss me off for the last 20years is First Direct - ironiclly owned/part of HSBC.
ps. HSBC is even more incompetent here in the colonies. The world's favourite bank - in the same way that Malaria is the world's favourite parasite.
Re: Fed up with this nonsense.
What if it prevents the creation of other business that would be worth more than it cost to collect the data?
So no sat-navs or A-Z in the UK because the govt had the copyright on all the mapping data and prevented competitors. Or you had no credit card address verification because all the users of your site needed a PAF license.
Imagine if the UK charged Ordnance Survey or Postal Address File levels of fees on DNS lookups. The UK would recover the cost of running nominet - but the US would have all that internet stuff and UK business would be restricted to sending the occasional email (priced the as a first class stamp)
Re: Copyright
Generally in the US any data collected with taxpayers money is freely available - so all maps, databases, govt funded research etc is available for free. It's one of the advantages of working of socialism.
Re: "at least 3 decades"
That's the problem with a topical show like DDD it's so dated.
It had plots based around media barons owning politicians, journalists in bed with the police, corrupt and incompetent bankers - ridiculous stuff.
Re: A quick heads up
Satanist - "thought for the day" ?
< special radio 4 vicar voice > I was cleaning the blood off the sacrificial alter the other day and looked up and saw a cricket match on the village green and I thought, our Lord Satan is a lot like a cricket match .......
Re: What I want rid of
It said Reality TV is UN-scripted drama. The idea is that you get all the excitement and tension without having to pay a Jack Rosenthal or David Nobbs - hence cheap - hence popular
Moore's law
Was always an economic one - it said that they most cost effective way of making devices was to put more on a wafer. In the good times it was basically the same cost to build each new fab at a smaller rule size. The problem with going to 22nm has been that it now costs more than 2x as much to put 2x as many devices on the wafer - so you are, at the moment, cheaper sticking to 28nm.
Foreign video games
It's worth noting that while these games may be appropriate to the mean streets of LA - they do not represent Australia's unique cultural heritage. It's time for the undoubted talent of Oz's own programmers to shine through
If they launched Abo-killer where your task was to wipe out the native population - you could use it schools to get kids interested in history.
>What entertainment did the current crop of politicians enjoy when they were younger,
Mostly comics where you had to violently kill anyone from another country.
But if these comics really had any effect we would have a generation of senior politicians who blamed Germany for everything !
Posted in Does Box really need $284m in VC cash?
Do you think that's why "site:localhost" went bust?
Re: Ignoring the sex for a moment
I work in medical stuff for a PLC.
There are memos every day about what can and can't be said publicly without there being an official stock market announcement. There are vastly more complex rules about confidentiality of data. We even had to change email provider because the previous one had servers in the USA and the lawyers decided that if an email went through American wires then a whole new set of HIPAA rules would apply.
Then there is a different set of rules about patents and who things can be discussed with at different filing stages of a filing. We even have a pet lawyer sit in on some meetings so that they can be claimed as privileged during discovery.
If some judge has just determined that all point-point electronic communications are "public" then the whole medical/financial/defence industries are going to have to go back to quill pens.
Re: Reputational damage?
I thought all those bad loans got magic-ed away when they were bailed out by the quantitative easing fairy?
Seriously it's getting to the point where the banks welcome people with sawn-off shotguns because it's less costly than letting their own people near the money.
Re: Reputational damage?
They went bust (sort of) and were bailed out by the taxpayer
They then managed to lose a billion quid/year while being lent money for free by the Bank of England
What reputation was there to damage?
Re: Genius - community investment catapults
Remember that for the opening ceremony you also need "Un trebuchet investissement communautaire"
Re: Irvine Welsh...
>Nope, Irvine Welsh wrote it, Danny Boyle directed it and John Hodge wrote the screenplay.
Well if you are embedded in the old pre-iPad linear-time straight-jacket.
With the new internet 3.0 multi-media-cloud-social paradigm then whoever blogged about it last invented it first.
Ignoring the sex for a moment
If text and IM chats are now publication - what about using them at work?
Are IM discussion with HR, or legal now still allowed?
Is a patent invalidated if we discuss it internally on Lynq in the same way as I would on the phone?
If I get an SMS about a server down - has that been published? Do I need to make a market announcement to the shareholders since I have published material affecting the performance of the business.
And I might just be being cynical but of course there is now no need for a warrant to intercept sms/IM because you have "published" it.
Re: How It Actually Went
Or more likely - RIM offshored their operations to an outfit in India and somebody wrote the keys on a whiteboard
Posted in Nokia shutters Qt Brisbane office
Not necessarily the end
>The ongoing financial basis of Qt will depend on the efforts of Digia....
Most of the Qt work at Nokia has been about putting Qt onto phones and QML.
It's nice, but as the market has decided, if your phone isn't running iOS or Android it doesn't matter.
Qt on the desktop is much more survivable as a community project.
Re: Fantastic!
Children's cartoons are perfectly valid prior art for patents
http://info.articleonepartners.com/blog/bid/76117/Donald-Duck-Patents-and-Ping-Pong-Balls
Re: Prosperity
> I don't see this working well in rural communities"
It's precisely aimed at rural communities.
At the moment you put government money into a new TV mast/repeater and everyone is still unemployed but can watch Trisha. You put the same money into running a broadband fibre to the village and they all have jobs as social media experts ;-)
Re: I'll be damned...
TV is less and less broadcast these days - with 2^N channels and PVRs. Really it's just a CDN/caching issue.
well duh....
Or to put it slightly more eloquently:
Captain Renault: I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!
Croupier: Your winnings, sir.
Re: Change Management
>Nail - meet hammer head
Unfortunately it's more like "that's a thumb"
"Yes but we are required to hit something 99.99% of the time"
"But it's a thumb"
Well we could escalate a "not hit a thumb" request to the new 6levels of change management but in the meantime keep hitting the thumb - we don't want to trigger a failed to hit something incident.
Re: > trend towards pigeonholing folk
It's not just pigeonholing people but companies
Even when the job isn't outsourced there are so many different divisions/subsidiaries/competing business units/etc all of who are at each others throat then if some other dept asks you to do something that will destroy the company it's better for you to do it - and meet your SLA - than say no that's wrong.
It may even be a legal requirement to "your" shareholders to destroy the bank rather than fail to perform your contract tasks !
Re: So they didn't build a gun with a 3D printer at all
No the article is more important than that. It's not about making a gun at home - that's easily down out of metal.
It's that the government decided that this particular component is impossible to make (it's a complex shaped cast+machined part) so this is the component that they would serial number/track/register etc - this is the licence key to the gun. The poster has shown that this isn't a valid assumption with 3D printers.
Posted in Jackson’s Hobbit becomes a trilogy
Re: "You saying you don't think it's a bad word?...."
I think the bigger problem is making all the crews American and moving the dams to Iran
App store
So does this apply to all games?
If I write tetris for the iPhone or Android do i have to get it approved by the BBFC?
What if I live in the USA - will i get extradited if someone in the UK downloads it?
Re: No it wont...
Remembering that for leap years don't count.
So it's not being 18 years old - it's being the 18th calender anniversary of their birth that matures their brain.
Re: No it wont...
>It's common sense really.
Would you buy your 13ear old son a comic where people are killed because of their race?
No - Well that's all the war comics we had when I was growing up.
Posted in US flags from the 1970s SEEN ON MOON
Re: Hubble
> they simply can't focus on something that close
The moon is still 250,000,000m away - that's not terribly close for something with a 57m focal length.
Your cell phone manages to focus on things 25km away doesn't it ?
Don't worry
The new laws will only be used against terrorists, or child pornographers, or drug smugglers - and you aren't one of them are you ???
Metalwork class
I don't know about this new fangled 3D printer stuff - but back here in the 19C we have lathes and mills and planars. With this we can build everything from a vickers machine gun to a battleship - hopefully this new metal technology never gets into the wrong hands.
Posted in US flags from the 1970s SEEN ON MOON
Re: Hubble
>but we can't take a fu****ing picture of the damned thing
I believe there there is an English mission to make a brass rubbing of it
Re: According to the policy on their website
>they require a warrant
Or just a quiet word from somebody in a dark suit from a 3 letter agency.
After all we are all on the same side here, and it's a matter of national security - no need for all that paperwork.
According to the policy on their website
They will supply: "Content and/or traffic data to an appropriate judicial, law enforcement or government authority lawfully requesting such information."
So basically everything is recorded by the governments in every country skype operate in.
Re: Simple solution
>* "Say Paradigm again - I dare you!"
Fscking genius!
Re: What do you mean
Yes it's always been like that.
The technical brief, "put one less rock on each layer until you come to a point" - became in management speak:
Bird with squiggly line, man walking sideways, man with dog head ....... and so on....
