* Posts by KrisMac

119 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jul 2010

PC market: ABANDON HOPE all ye who enter here

KrisMac

...then causalities are expected...

I'll raise your Causality with my Entropy and slowly grind your PC Market to dust.....

Its in the nature of Time and Space to do that to you......

Angela Merkel's phone was being listened in on by FIVE foreign powers

KrisMac

Re: The real question here is

So your saying that her phone was completely buggered then?

Fiery bits of Euro satellite to rain down on Earth this weekend

KrisMac

Ohhhh, The Irony...

Brought low by the very gravity it mapped in such extreme detail... curiosity and cat?

NSA boss Alexander and deputy to take a hike next year

KrisMac

What constitutes a Contractor??

Given their fairly central supply side roles in the PRISM system - and the fact that they are bound into those roles by what appears to be a Government contract that is fully enforceable in Law, (as evidenced by the ongoing appeals to SCOTUS by Google to repudiate (just) the gag-order clauses) - I would venture to suggest that Microsoft, Google and Apple could properly be described as among the largest US Defence Contractors out there...

They may not, (to our knowledge), be being paid for their services, but they are nonetheless Contractors complicit in the 'service delivery' for all that...

Hypersonic MEGA METEOR pulled from lake, then Russians drop it

KrisMac

"..pressure of reentry. Its...'

I'm being (somewhat) tounge in cheek here, but why do we call it "re-entry" for a bit of rock that (or an alien for that matter) that has never visited our bigger bit of rock before (presumably)... surely it would simply be "atmospheric entry"??

Obama Zucker-punched: 'NSA PR bungle whacked public trust in web giants'

KrisMac

Zuck in dc sucking up for more h1b's - and you are surprised WHY exactly?

Zuck is not in the business of championing the public good - he is in the business of exploitation! Whether that means exploiting the personal data of millions, (billions?) of people's personal information or the sweated labour of a few thousand underpaid but extremely gifted programmers from what we euphemistically refer the third world - (at label I find increasingly redundant given the fact that the worlds economies are increasingly centred on those locales).

Zuck does not care where the filthy lucre comes from, so long as it keeps rolling in....

THE TRUTH about beaver arse milk in your cakes: There's nothing vanilla about vanilla

KrisMac

Re: Come on

No, No, No! The most expensive perfumes use whale snot: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambergris

Leaked docs: NSA 'Follow the money' team slurped BANK records, CREDIT CARD data

KrisMac

Re: More proof

One of the reasons for Bin Laden's less than stellar bank balance at the end is that he spent nearly all of his inheritance personally financing and funding the development of the goat farming community in Afghanistan... ever wonder why go many of the goat farmers in that part of the world still worship the ground he walked on? Ever consider how many goats $25 Million will buy?

That is perhaps the crux of the fundamental error the US administration made in Afghanistan - the funds that poured into the country after the invasion went to the beurocrats, brown-nosers and warlords in Kabul, not the goat farmers in arse-end-of-nowhere...

Mighty multi-scope snaps stunning STARBIRTH image

KrisMac
Mushroom

I for one will welcome...

"...revealed two jets of materials, one aimed at Earth .."

... our high-energy radioactive overlords... at least the politicains will fry right along with the rest of us....

US taxmen told to hush up shadowy drug squad unit laundering NSA intel

KrisMac
Facepalm

Bzzzzzrttttt - Wrong!!

Now there is real impetus for the DOJ to pressure anyone delivering secure email to shut down:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/09/silent_circle_shutters_email_service/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/08/lavabit_shuts_down/

Gotcha: Oz Greens squeeze web snoop law confession

KrisMac

Re: Democracy, Transparency and Freedom of Information.

"..How do you change the system when the two parties are different sides of the same coin?.."

Simple: Vote for every Independant on the list irrespective of thier policies (or lack of them) and make the Incumbents earn their place at trough....

Security audit finds dev outsourced his job to China to goof off at work

KrisMac
Devil

The only reason anyone is angry at Bob...

... is that they didn't think of it first....

Latest exoplanet discovery is a virtual CLONE of Earth

KrisMac
Facepalm

Re: How old is the star?

And with their more dexterous hands their typing might have been a lot less inclined to random error than mine....

Apologies for typo's in previous post...

KrisMac
Boffin

Re: How old is the star?

Both the Grandparent and the respondents are kind of right in this argument it seems to me...

Yes it took 4.5 billion years for US to evolve as a technology using specied, but that is primarily down to the random disatsers that overtook, (brought to a dramatic end!) the evolutionary development of the previous series of dominant species that had climbed that far up the slope.

If left to themselves, (as opposed to bing mericlessly crushed back into primordial forms by a hurtling chunk of space rock), who is to say that the first technological speiced to evolve on THIS planet might not have been more closely related to iguana's than humans...

The Lord of the Rings saga lies hidden deep in your Mac

KrisMac
Boffin

Re: Not just OS X

The BSD calendar made it way into Debian years ago.. and from there it has been carried across most of the major Linux distros, (incuding Ubuntu et. al.) ever since...

Windows boss Steve Sinofsky exits Microsoft

KrisMac
Mushroom

"It is impossible to count the blessings I have received over my years at Microsoft," Sinofsky

...is that becasue it is impossible to count the number zero perhaps??

Black hole spews out 2-million-light-year-long stream of WTF

KrisMac
Alien

Re: Dumb question time from interested amateur......

..of course the other answer to my own question is that the source is wobbling around, which kind of implies spin on the black hole?

KrisMac
Alien

Dumb question time from interested amateur......

Why is the jet non-linear? Every other image of a cosmic jet I have ever seen has been effectively a straight line.. this one appears to wriggle about as it moves outwards from the black hole.

Could it be that the jet is encountering massive resistance a it travels away from its parent causing the leading edge to slow down? I was thinking dark matter, but unless there is a vast amount of the crazy stuff in the immediate vacinity of this specific black hole then that explanation still doesn't satisy the question of why this jet is so different from othersthat have been visualised.

Of course I've just not looked at as many jet images as others around here :-)

Pacemakers, defibrillators open to attack

KrisMac
Facepalm

Woah!... thats a bit of a shocker...

The downside of course is that no-one will have the heart to tell the patients...

Microsoft unleashes Windows attack tool

KrisMac

Of course...

...now the malware developers out there can test their latest techniques against Microsoft's very own analysis program to see if they can escape detection... He Who Does Not Get Caught Wins!

Patent trolling cost the US $29bn in 2011

KrisMac

Re: partially bollocks

"the companies gaining from the exercise can then use the money to spend on R&D"

Err... No! What part of 'Non Practicing Entity' slipped past your analysis? Patent trolls NEVER conduct R&D, other than researching who their next victim might be...

This is US $29 Billion dollars worth of attempted self defence fighting funds wasted which potentially drew directly from the R&D spend of those companies that WOULD have used the money for that purpose if they had not had to scrape the trolls off their footwear...

Australia goes cold on ACTA

KrisMac

Great... but still not good enough...

Deferral will be seen by some politicians as meaning "Lets get a new committee together to see if we can sneak it past some other way..."

ACTA needs to be killed stone dead! Deferral does not mean dead and buried...

Outrageously old galaxy spied birthing new stars at furious rate

KrisMac

Tense is everything...

This galaxy is 12.4 billion years away, ergo what we see now happened 12.4 billion years ago... so far so good... now why does elReg inist that the galaxy is 'producing' stars at an incredible rate? Surely it once 'produced' a lot of stars.. once upon a time in a universal location far far away, (from both our and its present location).. and may at this specific instant in time no longer even exist...

Saying this thing is 'producing' anything at all is actually total supposition because we know absolutely nothing about its true current state.

HTC locked out of Windows 8 tablet party

KrisMac
FAIL

Cognitive Dissonance at elReg?

el Reg seesm to not even be reading its own re-posts before posting comments like this one..

It doesn't take much of a troll back through the archive to see yesterday's post that said that not even Microsoft believes the Enterprise is interested in Win8: http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2012/06/07/win8_enterprise_yesno/

Stuxnet ≠ cyberwar, says US Army Cyber Command officer

KrisMac
Thumb Down

..so what WAS StuxNet if not a 'cyber-attack'?

No point telling us what StuxNet WASN't... setting aside the rights and wrongs of the need for the effort completely - if a deliberate, well planned, well funded, brilliantly coordinated, multi-front assault by one or more sovereign nations against extremely well protected, national security assets of another soveriegn nation does not qualify as a 'cyber-attack' just what the f$%k DOES?

Pray Tell elReg... because this article sure as hell doesn't (paint me extremely dissappointed - the reporting standards are slipping again)

New Apple keyboard patent may spell trouble for Android

KrisMac
Thumb Down

Yay for the f@#$ed up US Patent system..

..way to go United States of F$%^ed UP... you are screwing up your own industries by crushing innovation. good one guys..

Galaxy is teeming with homeless planets

KrisMac
Joke

Well it is 2012 after all..

...the boffins just need to look behind the sun to find the nearest wandering planet that's about to destroy all life as we know it... apparently....

HP earnings fall 44% on Whitman's debut quarter

KrisMac
Mushroom

Being on of HP's clients in the AP region..

...I can tell you that their service is nothing short of shit!

I have something in the order of AUD$250,000.oo worth of kit currently on back-order from pre-christmas and all I get from the vendor is a revised backorder ETA on a weekly basis to say how much later it is going to be - never why it is late in the first place.

Unfortunately I am locked into a global contract negotiated by the super-brain drones at our corporate HQ, (in another part of the world where apparently black is white, night is day and HP's shit don't stink), so I can't just tell then to shove their orders and go elsewhere..

What should a sci-fi spaceship REALLY look like?

KrisMac

Future spacecraft (whether Earthborn or Alien) are unlikely to have ANY standard shape...

As has been written about in numerous books, the most practical means of construction of a large star-faring vessel which does not bleed the home planet of scarce resources is to hook a few engines onto a hollowed out asteroid...

..end result is totally random configuration to account for the variability in shape of the original lump of rock... it could be anything from a flattened disk to an elongated peanut... pure spheres being unlikely unless the original rock was so massive that its internal gravity was strong enough to pull its sides in equally...

ergo - discussion of 'design' is pointless until we get to the point of selecting a rock...

Huge potentially inhabited water lake found on Jupiter moon

KrisMac
Boffin

Lots of precipitating salts....

...along with a few bundles of hydrocarbons and a little bit of heat energy and what do we get???

mmm... perhaps not so unpleasant for organics after all if what grows around Earths geothermal vents is anything to go by....

Immigrants face £49k wage minimum to stay

KrisMac
Flame

Well Played Sir!

Titus Technophone I tip my hat to you...this has to be one of more successful trolling posts of the morning, based on the frothing and foaming at the mouth it generated.

Well Played Sir indeed!

Russian Mars mission launches after multi-year delays

KrisMac

Phobos-Grunt ?

Are you sure that the name doesn't refer to the space marine in DOOM?

New pics of giant black sphere hurtling toward Earth

KrisMac

Excuse me but...

...shouldn't the astronomers be thinking things through in the right order?

surely "The gravitational influence of the asteroid will have no detectable effect on Earth" should really be "The gravitational influence of EARTH will have significant and detectable effect THE ASTEROID"...

Ass about backwards thinking is why important factors get missed...

Apple shovels $400m in stock grants to top execs

KrisMac
Unhappy

Based purely on statistics...

...some of them are unlikely to have much say in that particular matter...

US Navy in new electromagnetic railgun milestone

KrisMac

The Cynic in me says..

...just because they claim to have fired 1000 shots does not mean they have not worn out 1000 railguns in the process...

Politicial Double Speech is alive and well and living in the US Military

Steve Jobs named most influential game guy – ever

KrisMac
WTF?

Where the fuck is John Carmack??

Without Doom to kick start the whole multi-player experience, none of the more recent development would mean squat...

We would still be in a words of MUDS.. some folks arounde here will be too young to even remember what they were - and they have John Carmack and ID games to thank for not ever having to...

US decommissions massive Cold War nuke

KrisMac
Facepalm

...President Obama's vision of a world without nuclear weapons...

...has Barack been talking to th Pakistani's lately? I'm not sure that they 100% agree with his perspective...

Disk drive crisis: Economists are terrible weathermen

KrisMac

Looks like globalisation economists need to learn more about the butterfly effect...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect

'Can the wind off the wings of a butterfly in the Amazon cause a tornado in Texas?'

Chaos Theory in action.....

Dennis Ritchie: The C man who booted Unix

KrisMac
Unhappy

"...to all who have been touched in some way by Dennis..."

..this pretty much includes the vast bulk of the present generation of living human beings, (certainly in the developed world)...

The spread of computers into business and their development into effectively personal household appliances may have happend without the release of C andUnix, but I believe that it would almost certainly have been a much slower and much more painful progression. The explosion of development that we saw in the late eighties and ealy nineties might still be waiting in the wings to happen....

Rest well Dennis Ritchie... we all owe you a great deal

Virtual cloud monkeys go bananas writing Shakespeare

KrisMac
Thumb Up

..I agree with you up to a point...

The 9 character sequence selection/match process does trivialise the problem, but as a proof of concept of his methodology can be accepted as valid. In order to prove replication of Shakespere, the X number of randomly generated characters must be compared to the original text to determine a match....

What the experimenter now needs to do is increase the number of randomly generated characters to at least match the length of the shortest of Shakespere's sonnets. In that way, the match must be achieved without the jigsaw puzzle approach..

I doubt if the experimenter will be still alive to see his creation actually achieve the more difficult task but, (this being a random universe and all), I am always prepared to be amazed :-)

BOFH: No, the Fabinocci sequence

KrisMac

...also...

The 3-finger salute is something you traditionally give to a WINDOWS(tm) box not a Linux box which prefers the more graceful 'shutdown -r'...

... although in the PFY's case I suspect he would spend q few enjoyable hours repeatedly running 'shutdown -k' on the accounts server and watching the drones scramble to save their precioussess...

NASA: Beam me up some power, Scotty

KrisMac

However....

The Light beam is likely to be juiced up while the launch vehicle is relatively close to the source, (on the ground) and extend relatively slowly as the vehicle moves upwards through to the upper atmosphere...

... so the superheating effect will occur over both a longer time period and a longer distance than that of the average lighting bolt. We may experience that effect as a vortex effect causing quite high winds as the heated air funnels up the length of the beam sucking in cooler air below it...

...home made tornadoes anyone? How's that for man made climate change :-)

Google crams arsenal with 1,000 IBM patents

KrisMac
Pirate

While I agree with your premise...

... I feel it only right to point out that the 'most patenting company' in this picture is not the fruity one - it is IBM! Big Blue's patent portfolio puts everyone else into the shade.

The thousand or so patents snagged by Google this time around will probably be replaced by the IBM papetnt machine ten times over in the next twelve months.

I will grant you however that the fruity variety do seem more willing to use their bits of paper in more aggressive ways than even the Nazghul can dream up...

Torvalds dumps Kernel.org for Github after breach

KrisMac
Facepalm

...feeding the troll...

Once again the trolls show their ignorance...

The issue is not about the safety of Linux - it is about the stupidity of sys-admins who fail up patch up their boxes... That problem is completely indpendant of OS...

For those interested there is an old post from Information Week on Phalanx here: http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/infrastructure/210201115

The inportant factoid to take away is the version of Linux affected by the rootkit.

"Phalanx is a self-injecting kernel rootkit designed for the Linux 2.6 branch that does not use the now-disabled /dev/kmem device,"

To blame Linus as it is today for lazy administratiion that could have prevented this attack years ago is like saying that Windows 2008 Server is completely insecure because someone out there is still running NT4...

Will the looters 'loose' their benefits?

KrisMac
Stop

The problem with your utopia is that...

... there just IS NOT enough wealth in the world to go round....

If you take the estimated amount of currency in the U.S., Asia and Europe, and then round it up to the nearest hundred billion (to account for the fact that a lot of nations don't actually know how much money is in their country), and then turn it all into U.S. dollars, you'll come up with $34,370,000,000,000 dollars. That's $34 trillion. And if you divide that by the number of people on the planet, which is over 6.6 billion, you get $5,203.60. That means there there's only five thousand dollars available for every man, woman and child on the planet!

How comfortable to you believe YOU would be living on a little over $5,000.00 per annum?

Given that most people access their share of the $34 trillion out there via some form of credit, (VISA anyone?), the accumulated interest on the debt comsumes upwards of 20% of their annual 5 grand.. So the world's wealth is quietly dissappearing down a rabbit hole.

The only saving grace to that is the productivity of a very small percentage of the planets surface which continues to generate wealth in the form of minerals and food. Should the supply of new wealth ever begin to drop off, (Peak Oil comes to mind), we are all going to be in pretty bad shape.

The only way EVERYONE can have comfortable lives if is there are fewer of us. So, until people stop having more babies, the concept of EVERYONE living comfortable lives will remain a sad self-delusion that is only affordable to those who ALREADY HAVE comfortable lives.

LOHAN team buried under ballockets

KrisMac
Thumb Up

Well, the doughnut balloon plan kind of has legs, if someone out there can find one,

..how about an inner tube from a large tracter or heavy earthmoving vehicle (such as this: http://www.ausbusiness.net/wp-content/uploads/mining-dump-truck-265x245.jpg).

The upside of one of those, (other than its ability to hold a bit of gas), is that it would already have the necessary valves in place to retain said gas once injected....

Antimatter close to home

KrisMac
Joke

Conspiracy Theorists Unite!! :-)

So this 'South Atlantic Anomaly' doesnt hover ominously near Bermuda then does it? Could anti-particles be zapping planes from the sky???

*joke icon for the humour impaired*

PLCs a prison vulnerability: researchers

KrisMac
FAIL

Oh the Irony...

.... America, the country with one of the world's largest prison populations per capita, helped to develop oneof the most virulent computer worms. A worm which has just made security in all those prisons redundant...

I wonder if that potentiality was included in the NSA collateral damage assessment report prior to them giving approval for release of StuxNet into the, (Iranian), wild?

More on the ‘NBN hack’ that wasn’t

KrisMac
Trollface

An arrognat prick?

...so he will fit right in with the rest of the 'security' industry when someone inevitably offers him a job then won't he?

Russia’s space telescope in orbit

KrisMac
Alien

Spektr-R?

Bring on the Maxwell Smart jokes... :-)