* Posts by Destroy All Monsters

16005 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2008

NHS trust issues nurse jub flash alert

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Du wollen mit alles?

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=scrunchy

"A ponytail holder or hair tie, often very decorative with gathers. Can be solid or patterned. Usually made of fabric. Name comes from Scünci, a company which makes many types of hair products including ponytail elastics, etc."

Charver accessory, I reckon.

As to the Dalai Lama joke, maybe it's a double-entendre about attaining Nirvana and "being one with everything" or something along that line.

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Meh

Shurely you mean...

....employer-union relations?

Rogue software consultant's vast stash of DIY explosives

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Pirate

30 years for bank robbery??

Crazy stuff.

No need to worry about staying clean as Mr. White then. Knock yourself out, Mr. Blonde.

Adobe patches critical bugs in Flash and Reader

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Facepalm

Dogs and Adobe Developers must wait outside!

I hope these devs are not let into the bars established next to their respective workplaces.

LexisNexis open sources Hadoop challenger

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Alien

"Years in the making"

Yup, C++ can take away that feather and put it in its cap, I have no beef with that.

Not everyone can afford enough C++ coders and years though.

No beef icon? A cattle mutilator, then.

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Holmes

What!

"The company has not yet announced which open-source license it will use, but it will not be a copy-left license, the company said, permitting for derivations and improvements bearing the HPCC name."

I do think that copy-left does not mean what the author of these words thinks it means.

LulzSec hacks EVE Online as rampage goes on

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Big Brother

WAKE UP AND DO SOMETHING?

What, like, financing cybersecurity lobbyists who then can get a new cybersecurity czar anointed by the Powers That Be who then can order expensive gear at said companies for Government Use and/or ram through legislation that everyone needs to order expensive gear at said companies?

8m health records go walkabout

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Facepalm

Sounds like a "testing database" to me

I have seen it all...

States consider saner 'sexting' penalties for teens

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Big Brother

Violence, sometimes, _is_ a solution.

It's just the tiresome game of politicians empowered by Vocal Minorities [tm] minding your own business.

They give some, they take some, rinse, repeat...

Malware abusing Windows Autorun plummets

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Pint

The answer is 49

[dma@foo ~]$ echo "There was a lot of work in the industry to get people moved over to new technology built into Windows, and we felt that we had finally got to that point where the industry was in agreement with us that it was time to push it out to everybody" | wc -w

49

49 words to express "we couldn't be arsed"

Anonymous vows to attack Federal Reserve

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Trollface

Keynes would disagree....

Unfortunately hacking the website of the crony enrichment propeller does not make sound money make.

Too late for that.

Problem, dollar?

Patrick Byrne: 'See, I told you America's economy was busted'

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Big Brother

But is it actually a problem?

It's not naked short selling that is the cause of the economic collapse, and I would hope people have an idea of what is the root problem by now [http://mises.org/daily/5150/Fear-the-Boom-Not-the-Bust].

So you have a naked short seller - do his activities actually hurt the companies the publicly traded stock of which he is mishandling? Does he have enough presence to make appreciable dents in said companies' stock price? Won't other traders notice the persistent "failure to deliver" activity of the black sheep? Should we care [http://mises.org/daily/3066]

LulzSec pwns pron site

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Thumb Down

Stuck up much?

"before letting the friends of users know of their proclivity for internet porn"

So original!

EA angers fans over Battlefield 3 pre-order exclusives

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Trollface

Thus...

...will there be an accident in the airlock of EA's marketing department?

Hacker crims plant fake news to discredit security researchers

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Coat

A kinder, gentler mafia?

Planting fake news stories now instead of horse heads, are they?

Time to say goodbye to Risc / Itanium Unix?

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Paris Hilton

"because they are easy to virtualise, which cuts TCO"

Why and how does virtualization cut TCO?

Codemasters pulls website after hackers pwn customer database

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Unhappy

This makes me nervous

tonight__you.jpg

The New C++: Lay down your guns, knives, and clubs

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WTF?

U complain about the syntax?

This is 2011. There are IDEs and check-as-you-type syntax verifiers, you know.

And speed-typing when coding is really a non-issue.

"as opposed to an English-like syntax."

Because SQL was a big success in clarity?

BioWare blows brains with intro cinematics for Star Wars MMO

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Big Brother

They got it coming.

"Smuggler", eh?

I am supposed to root for tax-feeding protectionist Jedis interfering with honest trade?

HELL NO!!

US senators draw a bead on Bitcoin

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Big Brother

They want your soul and your money, your blood and your votes

"If traced by the Australian Tax Office, Bitcoins would probably get the same treatment as “barter” exchanges, with tax assessed on the value of traded goods or services."

Barter is taxable?

I laugh.

Sod that Mafia shit.

Farting death camels must die to save the world!

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Facepalm

"it's NOT a drought but a wrongly-assessed climate"

I know I can relax when my doc says that I am affected with a wrongly assessed resilient migrating cell structure.

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Meh

WHAT!

>>real paper money

Fartist camels and inflationist governments.

They muddy thought.

Brit censor stamps on The Human Centipede

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Unhappy

That's the problem...

"with actual penetration shots"

Because Someone Of Authority ("SOFA") thinks that actual penetration is pretty unnatural.

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Childcatcher

That's a "moot" point...

"People who enjoy Hostel , Saw etc , must have zero empathy for other human beings"

Central Bankers and Politicians queueing at the box office, then?

It's pretty bizarre crap. Imagine A Clockwork Orange with Alex going "HELL YEAH, MOAR!" during his indoctrination procedure.

Human nature etc.

Oracle cranks Red Hat Linux clone to 6.1

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Devil

Well...

If Orcale's kernel fell over and RHEL didn't I'm suuure the decision wasn0t that bad.

FBI affiliates hacked by LulzSec

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Coat

You know, man...

"That carpet really held the room together."

Google pits C++ against Java, Scala, and Go

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Holmes

@bazza: I see what you mean...

Apologies for the earlier flaming. Been twitchy for the last few months. Information overload probably.

>> My whole point is that there's nothing really new to SCALA's concurrency models. Both the Actor and CSP concurrency models date back to the 1970's.

Well ... yes. Although Milner's "Communicating Mobile Processes" added something. No, I haven't managed to fully get through his book yet.

>> CSP encouraged the development of the Transputer and Occam. They were both briefly fashionable late 80's to very early 90's when the semiconductor industry had hit a MHz dead end.

Sure did. I had two of those PC-ISA transputer evaluation boards. The T400 CPU [2 links only] is still in my "collection", not yet encased in lucite.

>> Remember, you only programme concurrent software if you have a pressing performance problem that a single core of 3GHz-ish can't satisfy. But if that's the case, does a language like SCALA (that still interposes some inevitable inefficiencies) really deliver you enough performance?

Mnnno... The trend toward less powerful ("green/power-saving") cores in multicore packages as well the demand for less-specialized applications for which multiple processes make sense (servers that need more than a single event-handling loop for example) pushes in the direction of giving developers tools that enable them to actually exploit all this hardware, with abstractions that are better than the ones standard Java itself provides.

Nothing that could not be had in earlier approaches to be sure (Occam. Limbo. Linda for IPC. Or you could whip our the MPI library), but now the demand for easy multi-processing can be satisfied with something that is in the general orbit of the Java Mass [i.e. runs where the JVM runs, can use the Java libraries, can integrate with existing code, can be sold internally, can be used with a known IDE, has a somewhat familiar syntax] so it's arousing interest.

Thus Scala. A bit further, with less-familiar syntax, Clojure with its "transactional memory". And even further, with less-familiar syntax and on a non-Java VM, Erlang.

>>Wouldn't the academic effort be more effectively spent in developing better ways to teach programmers the dark arts of low level optimisation?

When you write Scala code, it will run on a VM, yes. But then again, the VM will compile it down at runtime, and if you need to, and you can optimize that. If the language-level abstraction is well chosen, that should give you all the optimization you need.

Obligatory references:

Java developer in a multi-core era:

http://kadijk.net/interviews/Java%20developer%20in%20a%20multi-core%20era.pdf

Communicating Sequential Processes for Java:

http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/projects/ofa/jcsp/

Clojure and concurrent programming:

http://clojure.org/concurrent_programming

Communicating Mobile Processes. Introducing occam-pi:

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.159.3693&rep=rep1&type=pdf

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Boffin

No use putting go-faster stripes on your family van

"But the question is, did tuning programs in the other languages improved them over the stock C++ version? If not, then it doesn't really matters that C++ is hard to optimize, when you get the speed virtually for free."

No. The tradeoff is:

Java may be slower and have larger memory footprint

but

you get rid off the C++ "writing time" memory management problems, debugging efforts and all-around shoot-yourself-in-foot possibilities. The skillset needed is also lower [concomitantly, the "do not interrupt me now" requirement is weaker], which, believe me, is a _very_ good thing.

Ok, back to writing servlets in Groovy.

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Go

The market, Chris...

"I wonder why nobody talks about OOPascal anymore"

For the same reason that no-one was talking about Object Oberon or Oberon 2 before Java 1.0 downloads clogged the T1 lines.

I was amazed at the uptake back then. People were torturing themselves with C++ like crazy and bitching and moaning about it then all of a sudden...

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Meh

You smugness will cause your downfall, little one.

"there's nothing fundamentally new about languages like node.js, SCALA, etc. The proponents of these languages who like to proclaim their inventions haven't really done their research properly"

These people are done their research quit well, thank you. They are even saying so explicitly:

http://www.scala-lang.org/node/143

"Scala rests on a strong theoretical foundation, as well as on practical experience. You can find below a collection of papers, theses, presentations, and other research resources related to the Scala language and to its development."

And then: http://www.scala-lang.org/node/143#papers

Judge blasts Cisco's 'unmitigated gall' in ex-exec's arrest

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Right

thatsthejoke.jpg

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Big Brother

The US legal system a tool of US corporations?

Oh no, I would never have suspected it!

I'm shocked, SHOCKED!

What is the government doing? Oh wait...

Microsoft's patents shakedown betrays spirit of Gates

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Big Brother

Can't compete. End of line.

It would be informative if the "Intellectual Property" was labeled as what it is -- a "State Granted Monopoly". Otherwise might get the bizarre idea that it has something to do with things that one owns or has created or is actively bringing to market.

"What are we incapable of working on that could become important in five or 10 years? Should we do some "inventing" in this space and develop some monopolies that could give us a steady rent later on?"

Hackers say Acer breach leaked data for 40,000 users

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Trollface

Well, maybe. But possible not.

Hmmm.... a "Mukden Incident", "Gleiwitz Attack" or "Tonkin Gulf Incident" in Cyberspace?

Nahh... The proposal for mo' money are already in and the Central Bank Presses are rolling, no need to finagle something.

Union warns of strike action against HP

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Meh

Generic Union Dis-comprehension

"would be overshadowed by the costs to the taxpayer"

"government must not allow low-paid jobs to be offshored"

"It will be a disaster for UK workers and the taxpayer"

"will only ensure that Hewlett Packard's shareholders reap the benefits"

The usual communitarist mode. Money for shareholders is "ungood" (fact is that's what the whole show is about, fact is that money is taxed, then invested/spent somewhere), it's the gov's role to micromanage jobs or tell private entities what to do (the Fabrikvorsteher will see you now) and the poor "taxpayer" is invoked as there may be costs for expensive "social programs" - however these should already have been paid for earlier through taxes that HP paid, money which hasn't gone into the pockets of the "workers" but in the "social programs" trough, btw.

Of course, a strike will solve that, no problem.

Skype reverse-engineered and open sourced

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Devil

No

Hell, no.

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Black Helicopters

Holy!

Thumbs down?

Must be a RIAA/MPAA drive-by shooting.

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Paris Hilton

Cleanest room conditions.

"Bushmanov would at the very least have to demonstrate that he worked without a copy of the software to hand"

Doesn't he just need to prove that he didn't have a copy of the original source code nor worked on one in a previous life?

What's the point of reverse engineering if you don't have a copy that you can compare against?

Chinese army: We really need to get into cyber warfare

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Big Brother

To be honest...

...maybe the PLA hasn't yet gotten into the game yet. Maybe other branches (dependent on the Party) have been doing the illicit data elicitation.

In the same way as in the US, a takes a few years until all the security agencies (17, was it?) have emitted statements that they are hopping on the latest bandwagon and asking for pork and expanded bureaucratic empires.

"on the losing end of what could be the largest illicit transfer of wealth in world history".

I don't think so. The Bushbama bailouts come to mind first and foremost.

Student geeks build Rubik’s cube solving bot

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Thumb Up

Do they throw the cube into an incinerator afterwards?

Well, that' s cool.

That's definitely cool.

How did they manage to assemble a team of engineering students large enough without most wandering off to more important callings like holidays, beer parties and significant others? A sociological mystery.

California set to impose 'Amazon Tax'

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Big Brother

State needs more money for living high on the hog, invents perverse bullshit

"This tax, established in 1935, is levied on the purchaser when purchases are made out of state"

Oh, it's a "New Deal" measure meant to "promote jobs" by taking money off the people who need it to fuel random make-work schemes and do some state-level protectionism on the side.

Economic illiteracy, greed, the belief in the Socialistic State and trough-feeding for connected actors all come together.

Yup, surely this tax needs to be enforced.

Tesco pricing cock-up provokes beer stampede

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Boffin

What?

ACTUAL PRICE FOR THREE BOXES - DISCOUNT = 20

DISCOUNT = 11

ACTUAL PRICE FOR THREE BOXES = 31

US state bans Netflix, Napster password sharing

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Big Brother

Asinine Embiggment of Law

So who's going to police this, exactly? Cops be popping up in your bog or what?

I can't wait for the Nevermore A Zero Income act, where people are forced to undergo brain surgery at the end of the week so that they forget any media "consumed" during the week, and can stream them happily again (legally of course) for low, low per-stream fee.

Wake up, Linux hippies: No one 'morally obligated' to give back

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Meh

This is illiterate on so many levels...

Why aren't you in a hippie commune with 100% organic everything tilling soil or something instead of writing drivel on evil capitalist devices?

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Facepalm

What are you saying?

1) Vote for the left

2) ???

3) Obtain community

I have a bridge, slighty used, in Brooklyn.

Seriously, there seems to be a some confusion between things that are "in the interest of society" and that are "non-private/leftist".

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Holmes

Unfortunately Philosophy doesn't bring in the Bacon.

And neither does it produce any usable source.

Gb2 Tweed-Wearing Pipe Smokers' Club.

Gamers celebrate full return of PlayStation network

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Big Brother

Oh good.

The comment section will see a drop in the amount of State Hailing as the welfare check receivers will have something to do.

Francis Maude goes back 110 years for cybersecurity strategy

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Stop

"Chinese hackers"

Is this like Obama publicly accusing Bradley Manning of being The Leaker based on some foggy claims by recycled WiRed ex-hackers?

"Proof or GTFO"

Seagate, WD should put a gun to Brussels' head

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Linux

Which is why..

...we don't actually have *one* OS supplier.

Never had.

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Thumb Down

Brain fell out or something?

So what _is_ the "estimated cost to EU citizens and businesses"? Less taxes, of course.