* Posts by Destroy All Monsters

16005 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2008

Hardware-happy HP has swallowed a Sun death pill

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Windows

Synergy!

I flashbacked to 1999.

Synergy!!!

The doctors recomends it!

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Happy

Yes

Yes. It's their company. They may not care what happens to it of course.

AES crypto broken by 'groundbreaking' attack

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Pint

"It is now, by definition, less secure than it was."

There is a dead parrot sketch in there somewhere.

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WTF?

"Wonder if" just doesn't cut it.

SHOW ME THE MATH!

Hits keep on coming: HP buys Autonomy for $11bn cash

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Pint

"Eventually the US is going to stop this monopoly thing"

http://mises.org/daily/5037/Merger-Monday-and-the-Destruction-of-Wealth

David May, parallel processing pioneer

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Holmes

Not really.

You must not mix the abstraction and the architecture.

Abstractions : Mutex, Semaphores,Threading, Messaging

Architecture : Shared-Memory or Distributed Memory

The abstraction may or may not map well to the Architecture. The shared-memory architecture may make it possible to efficiently run some algorithms that cannot be run efficiently on a distributed-memory architecture (Algorithms where each compute node needs to access the whole problem state; certainly something in Quantum Mechanics falls into that area)

The threading idea is a rather messy thing anyway.

How about transactional memory as used in Clojure? Try Erlang or Linda. How about parallel Prolog? The possibilities are vast.

Free Ride: Disney, Fela Kuti and Google's war on copyright

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Pint

Not only that

You can currently spend a lifetime reading totally free books that are pretty current. Or "consume" music that you can get for free. Or install software that has only a transport fee on it.

"Content producers" take themselves far too seriously. Often they are just the vehicle to stuff a channel with the "new thing" or are riding a fad to fast riches. Or not. They then expect a lifetime of rent from the stuff they did or expect to be handed property überpowers

Bizarredly, I don't get rent for all the programs I write at work. How is that?

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Holmes

"it undersells the value of the music"

Which is what?

There seems to be some adherence to the labor theory of value here ("I put time and sweat into it, so it's worth X"). Which leads to calls for government redistribution schemes, forced taxation and what-have you.

Wrong.

If you get pennies, it's worth pennies. If you can't find the paying public, it's worth nothing.

This is why the marketing industry exists, and this is why distribution gets the lion share.

And this is why artists should take more control of their distribution channels.

Additionally comparing the Intellectual Property Output of East Germany with anything, then say that it's low because there was no IP enforcement is, like, you know, pretty weak. Lots of ripping going on over there, right?

Fort Knox military cops disgusted with solar patrol carts

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Big Brother

So why is there gold at fort knox?

Isn't Bretton Woods down the toilet? Aren't we off the gold standard since Nixon needed to print money to wage the Vietnam war?

Aren't these "federal assets" that could be sold off to make some much-needed paper money?

Or are the playas in charge actually secretly aware that the greenback is not worth a continental and hoarding in anticipation of the crack-up boom?

COMET WILL DEFINITELY NOT HIT EARTH – NASA

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Stop

Unfortunately

That story was before Fukushima.

We now know that US-designed 1st-generation nukes pop a gasket and croak at the slightest tremor.

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Alien

FOOTFALL!

That was why Krugman was going on about whipping up a Space Aliens Menace to kickstart the economy through war spending.

He knew it!

I KNEW it!

And the US doesn't have a Project Orion, a Space Shuttle fleet or a warehouse full of Gamma Ray Lasers to show them. We are gonna lose to four-legged Space Pizarro.

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Stop

Comet e-Lenin?

Well, there's a Red Alert!

TalkTalk, Tiscali fined £3m in bogus billing smackdown

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Coat

I hope customers voting with their feet will be an even bigger wake-up call

Yes, billing is hard. It's also practically the core business. You basically outsource the rest to Nokia-Siemens Networks.

Get with the program.

Gotta go. Yes, mine's the one with the golden parachute stipulating how many customers I have to have in the database by date X.

iPhone users richer, brainier, more tasteful than Android-ers

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Coat

Why not a brainscan?

It would show that Android user are afraid of the dark and had a childhood marred by authoritarian parents, which makes them prone to vote conservative, own guns, protest income taxes, listen to speeches of Michelle Bachmann or doubt the amerricanosity of Obama.

They should all be re-educated in fresh, new white buildings built in the beautiful green fields of Montana.

Samsung's lovely illegal tablet: Why no one wants to know

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Big Brother

Or...

You need to pull state power to your side.

As in "Intellectual Property" (wink, wink, nudge, nudge)

Red Hat beta revs KVM hypervisor to 3.0

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Headmaster

It's not grammar.

It's fricking semantics.

Dog fight game bitten with pro-PETA virus

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Big Brother

What are you, 12 years old?

What is the point you are trying to make?

Except you are yet another person who has trouble distinguishing the real from the rest.

And animals calling police? What??

"Hello I'm here in a meatshop and I have problems! Big problems!"

Explaining the Chocolate Factory's Patent Panic

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Paris Hilton

Big biz *doesn't* love patents?

Who then?

Attorneys, yes, sure. Politicians like to push them as that brings in envelopes. But otherwise?

The mythical Dyson-like inventor in his garage? Enough of that blue-eyed fairy tale already.

I can't think of anybody.

Or is the meaning here that Florian Müller defending patents for Big Biz?

Sony slashes PlayStation 3 prices

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Go

Finally!

A sign of deflation. Praise be!

Wait, what's that rustling sound? Did I wake up the money-printing dogs? DID I USHER IN THE GREEN APOCALYPSE?

BBC explains 'All your Twitter pics are belong to us' gaffe

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Trollface

And what if...

....someone "stole" a picture and no-one looked at it?

...what if it wasn't republished??

...what if no-one noticed??

...what if it was exactly the same picture, but restaged???

The BBC should really get with the IP program as long as it's there and make its own images or source them appropriately or even better CC its own stock, but seriously, all this "these photons are all mine" crap is just another form of corporate subsidy. "Hidden agendas". As if!

Shuttered SETI reboots ET pursuit

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This is what I was talking about

http://battleland.blogs.time.com/2011/07/19/an-eye-opening-peek-at-the-pentagons-weird-budget-math/

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Facepalm

What?

"But with the budget of the US Department of Defense currently a prime target of ongoing budget battles"

Just what.

Apple changed shape of Galaxy Tab in court filing

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Alan Apple, as we all know, invented the Apple Computer!

"Both devices have rounded corners and feature a flat surface centred within, and surrounded by, a metallic frame. When switched on, the text continues, both devices present an array of icons as shown in the image."

Both are also "Universal Apple Machines" as described by Mr. Apple in his groundbreaking paper "On Computable Numbers, with an Appleication to the iScheidungsproblem".

Clearly, there is IP to protect.

Has Google wasted $12bn on a dud patent poker-chip?

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Meh

This is a problem?

"The bigger problem is that Android is blatantly a copycat, but didn't need to be."

But so what?

If you insist on building your own application silo every time, you may well get nowhere. This is why the "IBM PC" exists.

Google Chrome beta turns on native code machine

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WTF?

Worshipping old Alchemy, I see.

Luckily these days we have paging.

And equating the clubfooted, useless 8086 segmentation with a "real computer"? Really, now.

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Headmaster

This looks like a pile-up of several concerns...

1) A Virtual Machine with its own bytecode (not bitcode) instruction set (One would have hoped the 'compiled code' would just be the parse tree result, which gives you lots of flexibility, but noo...)

2) A sandboxing implementation

3) A way of porting of "native code" between machines (Why?! People compiling to native should get what they deserve - either high performance or utter irrelevance.)

4) All of the above packed into a "browser"

Sounds like extreme complexity about to give people bad hair days.

Dell puts gun to Streak 5 tablet, pulls trigger

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Holmes

What do we expect?

Well, tablets that are at least as well designed as the iPad of course.

Man admits to running $800,000 carder ring

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Big Brother

Didn't work for AIPAC?

Prison for you!

Star Wars fans offered Blu-ray deals and previews

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Flame

Lucas!

How about

"You haven’t seen Star Wars until you haven't seen it on Blu-ray."?

IBM PC daddy: 'The PC era is over'

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Big Brother

"going the way of the incandescent light bulbs"

There is a laws forbidding the sale of PCs out?

DARPA drops another HTV-2

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Whose?

Clearly, the unexpected and probably terrorist entity in our flight path, of course!

Joe Public invited to hunt God particle

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Trollface

If they don't find it

It will be the "dog particle"

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Thumb Down

No.

Just no.

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Boffin

Ruh-Roh!

So what are they actually doing that can be separated-out in portions manageable by non-communicating classical computers? Statistics?

AFAIK, computing anything quantum on classical machines needs very tight coupling between the nodes.

Android respawn horror: Hacker says hackers' phones hacked

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Pint

Weird stuff

"He witnessed an advanced man-in-the-middle attack operating on both CDMA and UMTS networks and masterminded by an amalgam of Anon and Lulz."

I don't know why but this sentence caused dissociative disorder in my brain.

British Library 19th Century Books

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Angel

Where's Andrew?

There's IP to protect here!

New DVD discs claim 1,000 year life

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Thumb Up

Yeah!

Sounds good though one has await until confirmation comes in that the marketing chicken has indeed managed to cross the reality road.

"Does anyone have a punch card reader...?"

No, but I'm sure one an A-Team could wire one up over the weekend, with pure optical lecture and all. In the future, I would expect that to pull a physical image of the 2000-year-old disk you found behind the plaster wall into memory at 1nm³ voxel size should be possible with your handheld tricorder.

And then it turns it it contains porn.

iPhone 4 prototype journo off the hook

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A DA who decides that enough is enough?

Praise Be!

Now I want to know how many taxpayer $$$ have been blown on this Apple Ego Trip.

Grow up, Google: You're threatening IT growth

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FAIL

Conspiracy much?

"So Google sponsors front groups, think tanks, academic's legal departments, all waging the fight against copyright and patents."

Oh noes! Koch-brother-style astroturfing! What if they convince us? WHAT IF THEY ARE RIGHT!

"Why don't you give your book away for free?"

Wrong question.

The correct one is: what will keep me from grabbing your book for free?

What will keep me from doing that is: 1) Can buy at amazon in two clicks 2) If I'm interested I consider shelling out the correct thing to do.

Not 2) is not your market anyway.

State-Guaranteed IP protection stopping me from doing so? Not so much.

$25 toy radio used to knock out feds

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Facepalm

Not getting anything done here, do we?

"The first problem is that key distribution doesn't always work, so the team found users frequently get cut out and have to ask the rest of the group to switch off encryption for the duration of the operation."

Reminds me of Generation Kill where the guys in Humvees don't have the keys for the Cavalry Division's Choppers and so cannot either find out what they are doing dropping bombs just in front of them or massacring civvies. Can't remember which. Upon which general gallic shrugging ensues.

Open-sourced RSA solutions?

That's for smart people.

Who'd buy a fake battery?

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Meh

How weird

"Where IP isn't effectively policed, the business soon falls into the hands of the (real) mafia."

As opposed to the other (real) mafia of the IP-enforcing government?

Look, are there any real problems that might need solving? Who buys fake Vodka or fake pharmaceuticals? Well, the latter case I understand what with our IP-enforcers and legislators keeping stuff expensive or off-market if not hidden behind an MD-paywall.

"55 per cent of respondents found a link between IP crime and benefit fraud"

What's that then? Distillers applying for stimulus money?

US Air Force in a seriously stealthless state

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FAIL

I don't tink so.

"Just being slightly more capable means you can destroy the enemy every time, no matter what."

Only in Hollywood and neocon tech-jock talking circles.

Heavily-looted mobile phone barns issue 'safety first' missives to staff

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Flame

eBay will be POSITIVELY AWASH in electronic gadgets

Maybe there will also be people trying to print money on liberated colour printers?

Guess the "mainstream" economists cannot say anything against THAT.

SQL survives murder attempt by mutant stepchild

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Windows

You couldn't pay for it on the Unix

1) Expensive hardware

2) Expensive OS (Minix doesn't count)

3) Expensive GUI (shell out extra for the Motif Widget set an a C compiler? Sure)

4) Expensive Applications ("get a quote from our salesdroid by call 1-800-military-industrial-only")

5) There was no O'Reilly or amazon and a rare Internet Access Point so... no docs!

Lock in? Hell yeah.

BlackBerry blog hacked with riot-related threats

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Trollface

Hah!

1) Dox them to the Defense League

2) Buy Popcorn

3) ???

4) When worlds collide.

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Holmes

But couldn't care less for Tea Partiers, but...

"against waste and taxes but stand for NOTHING"

I think if people stood less for something, this would be a far better world.

Dunkin' Donuts waitress offers additional dunkin'

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Headmaster

You know that!

1) It is illegal in Iowa to dismember a corpse in order to hide a crime.

2) With Caylee's Law (i.e. the anti-Casey-Anthony law), it will be illegal to NOT call police if you haven't seen your brat for 48h and he/she turns up dead afterwards.

It's like a series of Monty Python's Flying Circus, only more real.

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Coat

It's a steak out!

With fries.

And what's with the US and their perpetual putting down of ANY entrepreneurial free-market activity?

Then Obama goes out and say His Country will always be AAA.

Like hell it will. Can't even get service.

Videogames caused riots says plod

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Devil

Now I want an explanation for...

...the LA riots back in '90.

It was probably too many episodes of "Miami Vice".

Prime Minister recalls holidaying MPs after London riots

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Big Brother

So say we all

"There's a reason you separate military and the police. One fights the enemies of the state, the other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people."