Posts by Jonathan 17

What a silly goose!

I give it 2 months till he is caught on having a tryst with a young male aide.

Even despite bringing Linux to the masses.....

Gnome and Debian will moan that Ubuntu doesnt contribute enough or in the right way. Oh yeah, open source is all about the choice to use software how and when you want, and modify it if you want, but if you modify it in a way we dont agree with then you are Bad.

Please... Ubuntu has probably drawn more people to open source than any other open source project.

Back in my day...

I graduated from a South African university (Rhodes) in 2006. In my 4 years, I learned VBA, Java, C++, SQL, C#, Haskell, HTML (who doesnt?), networking, computer architecture, operating systems, distributed and parallel processing, algorithm complexity, turing machines and other state machines, object oriented design and programming, and some other stuff I cant recall right now.

Bottom line: hire South Africans!

A vicious circle?

Christian group makes a scene next to a junction, causing drivers to rubberneck and drive into each other, causing Christian groups to think there is a need for a vigil, which causes drivers to rubberneck and....

How soon till we can send the Darwin awards?

So... how did he measure it?

And did he have to measure the flatulence too?

I'll send them a stern letter

After they saw what happened to BT/Phorm (namely, precisely nothing except customer disappointment) they knew they could do whatever they liked so long as they kept mum about it.

ICO - the toothless wonder. Maybe someone will throw it a bone?

Missing facepalm.jpg

Thats all.

Microsoft releases fix for 'Pwn2Own' security bug in IE

...a link to download a decent browser?

Two things...

First, why did the blithering idiot leave his passport at home? You know its a trial, its unproven and people havent heard of it. Just take your passport along and you can save a lot of trouble.

Second, why would P&O themselves be in charge of border control? Wouldnt HMRC want to be represented? if not, why didnt they let them know about it?

Not that, you know, there hasnt been a lot of press about these cards. I mean, obviously nobody at P&O reads either the newspapers or Internet news sites.

As long as...

... the laptops come with tubs of vaseline and a subscription to a porn site its okay. I mean, who owns a pc without porn? It just wouldnt be right, poor jobless folk given a laptop and internet but no eye candy. Poor guys.

I think we should subsidize their super strength lager too. We dont want them spending all of their money on alcohol so we'll just provide it for free. At least then they can spend their benefit money on food, or shooters, whichever seems to be the better idea at the time.

Lets have a laugh...

This December, when we are all filled with the giving spirit of Christmas, lets all buy cheapo £5 memory sticks, and fill them with random data. Download the police website and use that 500 times if you have to. Then, encrypt it, encrypt it again, and send it - anonymously - to the plod.

If you like, you can think of a puzzle for them to solve, to get their reward. Let the plod work for it.

Imagine if they suddenly received 1000s of encrypted flash drives, with no idea if any of them contained anything worth decrypting. And think about this - they would have to do some actual work, you know, investigation, to come up with a crime to charge you with so that they can use RIPA Part III on you.

Quite horrifying

Guilty until proven innocent eh? My sympathies for this guy.

Its obvious that the plod wants to flex its muscle and show how powerful they are. Really just another gang.

I would suggest RIPA Part III be altered so that section 49 can only be used if the suspect is suspected of particular crimes that his computer equipment could be hiding evidence of. As soon as the police dropped the terrorism charge, they should have dropped the section 49 charge because its now meaningless.

Its actually the biggest farce in the world, and its a shame El Reg has been the first, or so far only, publication to carry the story. We will send you to prison because you didnt decrypt your data, but we dont want it anyway because we arent charging you for terrorism or paedophilia. What then do they want the data for?

Does anyone ever think that...

The reason the Mayans stopped their long count calendar at 2012 is because it was so bloody far away they thought they would never get there?

And they didnt get there.

Hmmm,

But its okay for a board member to also serve Apple's board, amidst allegations that early Android phones did not have multi touch at Apple's request? No, not a conflict of interest.

Hmmm?

What will happen if the UK changes its law but doesnt prosecute ICO/the police for not prosecuting and/or investigating Phorm? Will BT and Phorm get off scot free?

When it rains it pours

That'll teach you to put all of your water in one bucket.

But perhaps security at amazon will increase after this, and so the cloud will have a silver lining.

Maybe Amazon had its head in the clouds regarding security, this should bring them back to Earth.

Sorry, I'll stop with the puns now. Anyone else?

In other news....

Yahoo! exclaimed! how! relieved! they! were!

Imagine if...

As part of paying taxes, we got to decide where those taxes were spent. As a kind of privilege for those few of us that arent on the dole, we get to decide where the money goes.

I would spend 20% of my taxes on the NHS, 20% on education, 10% on police, 0% on paying bureaucrats, and 50% on further investment in science.

The problem with buying PCs...

...is that it requires a lot of expert knowledge. I mean, it seems logical to assume that 4 x 2.3 GHz cores are the equivalent of a single 9.2 GHz core. In truth, yeah its nothing like that, and is quite misleading.

It does show how much your average high street store is willing to mislead, sorry I meant lie, to get sales. They will tell you anything you want to hear to make the sale. Anything. I'm so glad I know enough about this sort of thing that I can make my own buying decisions and build machines myself, saves me a lot of time and money. Not necessarily effort, but I enjoy that part anyway.

Whats the name of that law again?

Godwin's law is it?

Then again, I dont see why they bother. Since when have the government listened to actual scientists or other interested and informed members of the public when making policy decisions? They seem to prefer making mistakes and then blaming someone else.

See also: the classification of marijuana as a Class B drug, the Home Office/BT/Phorm mixup, the ID card scheme, the massive government surveillance database, etc etc.

While it is deplorable...

... let us not forgot that in Vista 64, its impossible to use unsigned drivers. So if you want to use a third party driver for something, say an Xbox 360 arcade controller (like I wanted to), you are out of luck unless you select the option on boot to disable it, every single time you boot up.

Why? Because otherwise naughty consumers would use naughty software to copy movies. So Microsoft, knowing which side its bread is buttered on, caved in to prevent such a thing from happening.

My point is, while what Apple does is deplorable, its no worse than what Microsoft does in the name of DRM and phoning home.

Does no-one else think of this?

So now you can get your Apple on an Orange?

Geddit? Apples and Oranges?

Sorry...

Really?

Quote: "Despite suffering the effects of exposure to unfamiliar sexual practices, Palmer checked the CD in two more computers, just to make sure."

She watched it three times to make sure it was porn? Good for her.

Pics

.... or it didnt/wont happen.

@Tony S

I dont watch TV at all anymore, I watch any programmes I want to watch via streaming or DVD. I dont sit in front of the box and vegetate. I make an exception for Top Gear though.

Its a rehashing of a series that got one of the best reimagings ever - do they really need to reimagine it again? How about, I dont know, new IP?

Now it makes sense why Big Content is pushing so hard for copyright extensions - they dont have any original ideas anymore!

Wait....

You mean they are at a loss for Words?

Why havent the police arrested him yet?

Come on, he took a photo. With a camera. He was looking at the sky so it must have been a public place. And who goes out at 4:33AM - sounds suspicious to me. This guy has dodgy written all over him - who owns a camera these days?

Really, just arrest him so that the rest of us can live safer. If hes got nothing to hide, he shouldnt be taking photos.

@AC 11:20

Thankfully, digital security is a bit more advanced than that. It relies on factorising extremely large numbers using prime numbers, which themselves are impossible to guess (well, without a really really long time). Digital security can and has been done well, the point is that this is not one of those cases. That Laurie as able to access and edit the data shows its insecure.

But yeah, this ID card thing isnt as much about protecting identity as it is about turning us into well behaved little sheep with a number stamped on our ears, sorry I meant ID card. Really, if ID theft is a problem, then make less information available! Not more. Its database this and ID card that, but nobody at UK.Gov is willing to take responsibility when things go wrong (see the recent high court ruling on that here at El Reg) or if powers are abused (see Phorm and UK.gov in cahoots).

it can only be...

Either yggdrasil, the world tree.

Or The Enterprise, to boldly go where no tree has gone before.

Or Paris, she REALLY gets around.

GPU Comparison

quote:"Nvidia's Quadro FX 5800, on the other hand, has 240 processing cores and 102GB per second bandwidth to its 4GB GDDR3 memory. That's still slower than the specs of the FirePro V8750, but its 4GB memory allotment is significantly higher than the 2GB of the V8750 and the 1.5GB of the FX 4800."

You do realize that in most cases the FX5800 will be faster because its shader processors run at a much higher clock speed? both of those chips use very different architectures, so you cant directly compare shader processor to shader processor. Only benchmarks can tell the story.

No mention of CUDA or OpenCL? I'm disappointed, what good is an accelerator without an API?

@Insane Reindeer

Not much difference really, maybe except the chips used are specially selected and the boards are probably more fault tolerant. There used to be firmware hacks that you could do to flash a GeForce into a Quadro, so essentially the silicon is the same but the price is much higher. Some additional features get enabled, such as higher precision functions I think.

But yeah, Quadro's and FirePro's just generally have higher profit margins.

Shock! Horror!

A computer and operating system manufacturer that has positioned its products at the higher end of the market, and currently manufacturers no entry level or low cost systems has a higher average selling price than... welll everything else.

This just in - Lamborghini's have higher average selling prices than Toyotas! No really its true.

Really, irrespective of your brand preference, that Apple would have a higher ASP is really is bloody obvious I wonder who's retarted idea it was to report that. Part of the article is more interesting - that among those who want to pay more, they generally choose Apple - but the rest is not.

@AC and Colin12

Completely agree with both of you.

First, companies continue to engage in such behaviour - fraud, abusing monopolies and price fixing - because its still economically sensible to do so. Their gain by behaving illegally is worth more than any damaging PR and any fine. In future, accountants should assess the total gain that the corporation made from its actions, and then fine them double that. Hit them where it hurts, and the shareholders will vote the entire board out. Oh, and whoever made the decision to do that (and some definitely did, it didnt just "happen") needs a jail sentence and a 10 year ban on working in any corporate position with decision making authority.

@Colin12

Yeah, I dont know why Yanks (and some others to be fair) complain about the EU - the US DOJ found Microsoft guilty in the past and its currently investigating Intel. And they also hit those LCD manufacturers who were price fixing. And Intel has been found guilty in both Korea and Japan. Why then, as soon as the EU stands up for its customers, they are automatically left wing commies who cant run their... economic area?

I'm happy that the EU are doing this, obviously if Intel really had a problem with it they would pull out of the EU entirely, but at the moment it seems they admit what they did but deny that it was illegal. Most reasonable people (including, importantly, The Law) disagree.

Author = fail

Frankly, the author is the one with a life full of fail. The moral of the story is NOT "dont use teh interwebz, ever, for anything", its "make sure your passwords are secure".

Lots of companies are turning to software as a service to lower costs by reducing the amount of insfrastructure and software licenses required. They dont do it arbitrarily, on a whim. I should know, I work in the industry, and we have multi billion pound clients for whom security is very much an issue. They trust us with their confidential data - why not? Our security is good enough to satisfy their auditors and internal IT.

I'm sorry you hate Google Docs, personally I cant see why. But really, the fail isnt with using Google Docs, okay maybe they could have picked a more secure cloud service, but the cloud in itself is not at fault. The fault is with the idiot who sets his password to his firstname and uses the same password everywhere.