* Posts by Destroy All Monsters

16005 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2008

Intel came a-knockin' for Cray super interconnects

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Devil

People are talking "millions". I hope they count in centîmes...

How does that compare to a billion dollar for a photoshop filter and assorted commodity hardware?

Ex-BP engineer cuffed 'for deleting Deepwater spill texts'

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FAIL

Let the record show...

I crap on everything that Sicherheitsdienst General Holder emits ... but that guy is not smart.

Asleep during the engineering ethics course?

Not groking that BP might hang him out to dry if SHTF?

Not keeping a personal copy or an annotated action log? One of the portable recorders that medical personnel use might come in handy. Well, one is always smarter afterwards, but at least a notebook...

BP not dumping all the conversations to WORMs in triplicate with a notary sitting on each?

The blame train is just leaving the station...

Cloudy crypto SSO firm: Passwords must go

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Devil

"He hinted it was a high-security organisation but didn't say what it was, which market it operated in, or even whether it was in the private or public sector."

Black Mesa Research?

"Yeah .. High Security! That's why we leave armed missiles lying around for everyone to check out. It's part of the tour!!"

'Asteroid mining company' makes classic hypegasm debut today

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Trollface

Larry Page will BWAHAHA from on high while admiring the exceedingly decorative crater of Oracle Headquarters.

Turing's rapid Nazi Enigma code-breaking secret revealed

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Pirate

Re: (C) StationX and copyright

Nice knowing these things but my care-o-meter is at 0.

Pirate naow!

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Holmes

Re: "squeezed the juice" out of the two papers...

Even found the PDF on the Internets:

http://www.springer.com/cda/content/document/cda_downloaddocument/9783764316341-c3.pdf?SGWID=0-0-45-401018-p2322058

Can't be bothered to check whether it's open access by design or by oversight.

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Headmaster

Re: "squeezed the juice" out of the two papers...

> Biggest contribution by far from the polish was getting their hands on a working [Enigma] machine

That sounds entirely too Hollywoodesque.

Looked it up in "Mathematics and War" [2003, Birkhäuser Verlag]

The Polish mathematicians could read most german codes by 1932, but didn't manage to break the Enigma. They obtained a commercial Enigma used by business firms to get general insights into the machine. Then the french were contacted by an employee of the Reichswehr cryptography agency, [Hans-Thiko Schmidt] who sold secrets to captain Gustave Bertrand (but not the Enigma wiring scheme details). Captain Bertrand then contacted the Polish Cipher Bureau, and the final arrangement was that the French were to concentrate on delivering intelligence reports from Germany to help in code breaking, while the Poles were responsible for theoretical studies of Enigma intercepts. These guys actually cracked Enigma successfully

> In late 1934, the three mathematicians experienced the exciting decryptment of a transmission they could read as "To all commandants of the airfield throughout Germany" The signal ordered "the transportation to Berlin, alive or dead, of Kerl Ernst, adjutant to S.A. chief"

> Thus 1934 was the year when the cryptology team of the Polish Cipher Bureau broke the ciphers of the German Army (Heer) and the codes of S.D. (Sicherheitsdienst der SS) as well as codes and ciphers of the German Navy. The Kriegsmarine used three kinds of Enigma keys: operational, staff and admirals. The last key was resistant to breaking for a long time.

The Bombe came later after Enigma keys were changed regularly, but it was all based on the Polish work.

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Mushroom

"squeezed the juice" out of the two papers...

And out of Turing, too. Yes, I mad.

Now, how does this relate to the work polish mathematicians did on cracking Enigma before the red/brown sandwich invasion?

Apple sued for every touchscreen device by Flatworld prof

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Coat

Re: Apple bitten.

If the law is an ass, make sausage!

Martha Lane Fox hits caps lock, yells at small biz websites

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Headmaster

Re: Bit ironic...

One is sarcasm, the other not.

Great HR mistakes of our time - Aviva fires 1300 by email

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Terminator

Good that they didn't have full business process engineered and in place.

Receive E-Mail.

Access to computer automatically denied.

Can't open desk drawers. Automatically locked.

Window locked down, suicide is not an option.

Burly roboguard shows you out of your office; door closes and access code blinks red.

Speaker system gives out a canned announcement by good-sounding female text-to-speech system that you are now leaving the building.

Never be able to read the retraction.

Workers' comp covers sex-related injuries, judge rules

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Paris Hilton

So does this only apply to govnment employees, then?

"Hard at work" wink, wink, nudge, nudge.

Though I don't know how one can possibly claim monies for psychological distress if hearty rumpy pumpy results in a collision with a descending illuminatory device.

Oracle v Google round-up: The show so far

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FAIL

Woah that slide sucks

This is like copying commentary. Yes, in this world where you can trademark A Goat On a Roof, this counts as "Intellectual Property". Remember we are going up against copy-friendly people like China with that kind of stupid.

The only really nasty thing one can say about this that in both cases the error report in the exception will certainly confuse the hapless developer. Too half-assed to actually say "Out of range [X,Y] with index Z", instead just saying "Z"? Yes, good work, one side. Or both sides.

2,500 copycat hack attempts on abortion provider site – report

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Meh

Re: Please...

"One state has repealed an equal pay law, that's bad"

I still don't see how forcing someone to pay a woman more when he doesn't want to is helping employment of women (you need to follow up with "positive discrimination" laws and it goes lawyersque downhill from there) , but twenty bizarre ideas are orbiting in the heads of progressives even before they have eaten their equitable breakfast cereal.

Google I/O snafu greenlights crap code, angers devs

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Trollface

"some of whom had stayed up all night trying to win tickets to the show"

foreveralone.jpg

Irish national telco gets 100 days to escape €4bn debt hell

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Mushroom

So far, so Eurozone

-- Justice Kelly said Eircom was "of great strategic importance for the State" and a "key provider of fixed-line services throughout the country".

Too big to fail? Important for the State? Is this Mussolini's Italy?

It's just another service provider. One with 800'000 EUR debt per employee. Who holds that debt btw?

Probably "we".

Nokia loses $1.7bn in Q1, sales chief falls overboard

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Thumb Down

Re: Heading in the right direction

I hear about Xbox hueg losses and what is this?

"sales chief too stubborn to accept and embrace the future of ... Windows Phone 7"

"great Lumia range hardware"

"deadwood in the company that's holding it back"

"almost worthless symbian platform"

"Elop's experience and drive will ensure the company regains it's lost market"

Has been copypastaed from a Microsoft talking point memo? Or maybe an investment boutique flyer?

And it's "its", not "it's"

Swiss, German physicists split the electron

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Thumb Up

Totally off-topic

An idea on a future approach on how to get rid of the pesky spacetime and unify QM and Gravity:

http://media.scgp.stonybrook.edu/video/video.php?f=20120411_2_Arkani-Hamed_qtp.mp4

Some of the Anons here may be interested.

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Paris Hilton

Re: re: Bohr model was abandoned 40 years ago

Electrons are still "infrangible"

This here phenomenon seems to occur in a more complex materials that have several electrons and nucleai bunched up in a fracking complex structure.

The problem is that the reporter tries to describe something using imagery that doesn't necessarily apply. One would have to start from the mathematical foundations. The methaphors may come later..

Zuckerberg blew $1bn on Instagram 'without telling Facebook board'

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FAIL

A chinese company would implement that solid patent and sell the product for valy, valy cheap.

> patent for post-processing photos

No

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Unhappy

Re: 13 employees and no cash flow

Anyone remember when the whole of MySQL AB was valued at 1 billion and people complained?

It feels like that was just after Hindenburg got elected.

Microsoft bigs up open source, then stuffs it under the sofa

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Devil

The evil that permeated it at birth never can be expunged!

"It's particularly troubling since the company seemed to be making so many positive strides"

...2012

...Still hoping Microsoft will make an actual positive stride, ever

Nope.

Greenpeace calls out cloud names on green claims

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Paris Hilton

So much hate!

Is El Reg the "Talk Radio" for techies?

Stay tuned....

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Holmes

"People need energy to do stuff" shocker

"Running telecoms on diesel generators is FAIL on so many levels."

How is that then?

You may not have the luxury to have a gas turbine trucked in and connected to a large preexisting infrastructure or even power your hardware off a reliable electricity cable.

Things that look like FAIL to well-pampered central europeans may make perfect economic and logistic sense elsewhere.

Mystery hologram disc upstart gobbles InPhase blueprints

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Alien

Re: 50 years

Heechee Prayer Fans, maybe?

WD lets loose ferocious 1TB VelociRaptor

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Paris Hilton

Re: Too late.

I don't get this at all.

You are already in crack-up boom mode, so you buy the SSDs, is that it?

Don't forget that you might have to replace them in a hurry at some future point in time, possibly just as the guarantee expires.

Microsoft details Halo 4 release

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Trollface

Master Chief is back

Smörebröd,Smörebröd-Römpömpöm!

Oracle v Google could clear way for copyright on languages, APIs

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Mushroom

"Intellectual property exists to encourage innovation"

That's the mental disorder right there.

It does NOT exist to encourage innovation. After all, if someone knew how to encourage innovation, we would be cruising the galaxy right in a Jetson two-seater by now. It exists to put a "NONE SHALL PASS" fence around someone's crap that he deems to fall under "IT'S ALL MINE, MINE!!", completely forgetting that he stands on the shoulders of all that worked before him and worked next to him.

Just looking at how patents came to pass, how they metastasized into a daily dose of cancer and the historical evidence of the damaging effect on innovation tells the whole story.

Copyrights have their use. But these too should be strongly curtailed. In particular, no control on grey imports, please.

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Thumb Down

Re: Get rid of java

Go back to /b

Hacker jailed for 32 months for attack on abortion-provider site

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FAIL

Foxy American Problems!

"it is sickening to observe that"

So you have actually observed that?

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Thumb Down

Re: I'm guessing the others just shat themselves

That would take more effort than collecting charity door-to-door.

Better have another donut.

Or how about solving crimes?

ANU puts quantum random numbers online

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Unhappy

IMPOSSIBRU!!!

Foiled again!?

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Trollface

How to generate classical random bits from lolcat fluctuations

1) Take all possible pictures of Schrödinger's lolcats and arrange them in a box.

2) Assign a selection probability to each picture, exponentially decreasing with the fatness of the lolcat, but so that the sum of the probabilities over all pictures still yields at most one.

3) Select a picture at random, using the previously assigned selection probabilities.

4) If the tail is on the left, emit 1. If the tail is on the right, emit 0. Otherwise, emit NULL (and restart the experiment.)

Now use lasers somehow and there you are.

El Reg posts dirty pics for old computer buffs

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Thumb Up

More like this at:

http://www.markrichardsphotography.com/#a=0&at=0&mi=2&pt=1&pi=10000&s=0&p=5

The women in my office don't understand this at all.

CAPITALISM without PROFITS - Welcome to the Instagram Era!

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Big Brother

Holy bong, this bings it!

It's just because money is cheap, credit is easy and no-one will ever pay anything back.

In a world where 3 trillion dollar can be injected into the economy and the interest rate be kept below zero for years and years without a single person setting himself on fire in shame and desperation on the front porch of some parliament, anything can happen.

Let's roll!

As for the 20th century fraud squad. What can you do when government is the one performing the fraud? In fully daylight? And it is DEFENDED for doing so?

Life on Mars found – in 1976

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Thumb Up

Re: Is it too soon to launch a preemptive strike?

Nope. "All options are on the table". Congress has already passed a secret act to "finance and support freedom-loving earthbound microbes in the fight for interplanetary democracy". I hear they will be on an outbound CIA lander soon.

Hitachi spins up 'leccy fan motor sans rare earths

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Meh

As previously linked...

http://atimes.com/atimes/China/NC24Ad01.html

"In any case, in a few years the dreaded Chinese rare earth monopoly will have collapsed, with the assistance of the Chinese themselves, and the free world can enjoy its hybrid vehicles, its smartphones, its Tomahawk missiles, and its night vision goggles free of the anxiety that China will make the rare earth world go dark."

Developer leaks Microsoft product plans for next two years

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Beta Sharepoint Evangelizion

"I have been evangelizing SharePoint since Microsoft produced the first beta in early 2000"

WHY!

Naked gyrating iPad vid exposes truth behind Apple's billions

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Holmes

Re: it's all relative isn't it?

Uh, yeah?

So people are migrating from the countryside to do "quasi-slavery"? Ain't that bizarre. Why didn't they stay in the countryside?

"the pay is better than anywhere else"

Ah yes, that's the point, right.

Death Star dinosaur aliens could rule galaxy

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Alien

Nazi Space Raptor will meet you now!

Even humans have arses too big too comfortably lift up and accelerate to appreciable speed. I do not think Trannysaurus will drop down in a vehicular device soon. And then again, why not meet them? Because lizard races are hollywoodian ungood?

Anyway, I remember some paper about how the chirality comes about due to [the magic of] galactic magnetic fields working on amino acids buried in comets. So there.

And on a far planet, we read:

"Death Star ape aliens could rule galaxy!!- Rather than dying out in the dimly lit aftermath of a ginormous asteroid impact, apes on Earth may have instead spread to other planets and built a terrifying space-conquering empire...."

German scientists link two labs with ‘universal quantum network’

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Holmes

WILMAAA!

"Hence the experiment achieves the genuinely spooky: a read-write operation across two laboratories connected by around 60 meters of fibre, in which the receiving atom becomes entangled with the transmitter, even though there’s been no direct interaction between them."

I do not understand... hold on, yes I do!

"German scientists link two labs with ‘universal quantum network’"

should actually read

"German scientists 1) copy quantum information from one atom to another and also 2) link two atoms into a single quantum system, both by exchange of photons via interconnecting fiber"

This is extremely nice engineering. This is not particularly "spooky".

Yes, I know that the "spooky" comes from having to deal with a probability calculus using complex numbers instead of reals. Nature is like that. Deal with it.

This is not particularly spooky.

Bacteria isolated for four million years beat newest antibiotic

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FAIL

FFS

"In other words, bacteria are already good at battling antibiotics, so it’s not entirely safe to assume anthropogenic antibiotics have created an evolutionary hothouse that forces bacteria to defend themselves."

FAIL at logic.

The bacteria population is NOT good at battling antibiotics at least by default otherwise there wouldn't BE any antibiotics.

The bacteria population BECOMES BETTER at battling antibiotics otherwise there wouldn't BE more antibiotics-resistant strains right now.

This "BECOMING BETTER AT" evidently comes from evolutionary pressure on the bacteria population. It doesn't come from God's Own Farts.

This is what "evolutionary hothouse that forces bacteria to defend themselves" MEANS.

Whether ancient bateria have activated genes to pump the molecules to the outside of their fatty surface is neither here nor there. It just means that modern bacteria probably can just fallback tio already-present genes, leading to better survivial in the hothouse.

AOL investor: $1bn Microsoft patent deal not good enough

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Mushroom

Re: If you don't like it, sell

Maybe so, but activist shareholders do exactly what they are supposed to be doing: take an interest in what's being done with the company they partly own and what the board that they employ is up to. Most shareholders are content with letting the board cash in, run everything into the ground, then jump out with a golden parachute. Then lefties complain about how corporations are "evil" and similar crud.

Android spanking iOS in world's BIGGEST mobile market

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Meh

"basically they want iOS / iPhone"

Are you from a strategy boutique?

They do NOT want iOS/iPhone, as apparent preferences show.

They might *consider* "iOS / iPhone" if the price on the rebranded Foxconn gear was right (i.e. low enough to not drop out of the preferences list immediately). Time for price readjustment. Unfortunately, that would destroy the cachet of the item, right?

TITANIC 'UNLIKELY' TO SINK AGAIN, says prof - apparently

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Megaphone

MARITIME ARTIFACT ESCAPES NIETZSCHEAN ETERNAL RECURRENCE!!

Film at 11!

Dark matter hits you once a minute

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Holmes

Pretty bizarre

No-one has ever confirmed a single WIMP and the LHC has shown nothing so far.

Better talk about neutrinos.

AOL sells Microsoft 800+ patents for over $1bn

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Big Brother

Re: IP Bubble?

Unfortunately, this means, given the fact that banks will have stashed their bailout money into exactly such a bubble [the bailout money now holding up your ever-decreasing-in-real-terms pension payout against total annihilation] BIG BOOM SOUNDS SOON. Then further destruction and wailing, followed by cries for more bailouts, socialization of unsustainable debt through TARP 2020, praising of Keynes [and a flood of books praising the genius of Keynes], praising of Marx, Stalin or Roosevelt and loud demand for "government job programs" (which will probably consist in recycling burnable materials and copper from deserted, dead towns). As well as appearances of Michael Moore. Oh God.

I can't wait.

MPAA boss: 'SOPA isn’t dead yet'

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FAIL

Prepare your anus!

Getting in touch with the crying-all-the-way-to-the-bank content-provider reality, more like. This "reality" being pushed by crying , know-it-all, I-was-there-but-you-weren't El Reg contributors btw.

Now allied with the securo-nazi-congressional-industrial complex. With "bipartisan" support.

One would think these people have checked out the antics of a certain Middle Eastern country where "shoot and cry, shoot and cry" is the order of the day.

Asda knocks out Kobo e-reader for £49

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Holmes

Re: Great deal, it's not a Kindle

> I had heard the Kindle's performance with PDFs was also terrible.

Performance ain't so bad in general except for PDFs that are actually scans or mainly image, but "personal Kindle 3 experience stories":

PDF may not be visible in its entirety with the lowest part of the page impossible to get onto the screen.

I have one PDF that repeatedly locks the Kindle up. You then have to try to reboot it by doing several cycles of power-off button 15s presses. Frustrating as hell.

...So I'm wary of this device. The user interface also needs some serious work by UI gurus.

Hacktivist 'Hardcore Charlie' claims China military hack

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Meh

Pics or it didn't happen

Off the bragging haxxoring weirdo area, Duqu has made a reappearance...