I remember waybackwhen I last used Autonomy's categorisation and search engine. It wasn't very reliable and I never thought it did a very good job - neither the categorisation nor the searching. It always felt like a triumph of sales over engineering. I was amazed at the sale price to HP when it happened. Maybe this is something different, but somehow it rings true.

This isn't a bad thing. Good companies (not just apple) take risks and try out new things. It only takes one in ten to be a good product, and one in twenty to be a great product to keep the company going. The trick is to make sure they're not *too* ludicrous before you launch them, and if they don't work out, make sure you realise this quickly and fail fast If you don't keep moving and innovate, some other bugger out there will and you'll get left behind. I'm looking at you Microsoft. [standard imnotafanbois disclaimer; believe what you will; ymmv]

I pay my TV licence (ok TV tax) in the UK gladly.

The BBC is one of the few things I think we do well in the world - the journalism and news reporting is beyond world class - it's world beating. Impartial reporting, truly global coverage. That can be hard to believe sitting in England, but as soon as you spend long enough abroad to try any other country it makes you appreciate how good the Beeb really is. Just try any southern-mediterranean broadcaster, Chinese state television, Russian state television, Fox News in the US (ok extreme example, but the rest of the local and national US news is also worth taking a look at while you're visiting) and compare it with the Beeb. It's simply in a different class.

This may come across as slightly anti US-TV. It's not meant to be, but you've gotten me angry and ranting now. It is meant to be scornful of someone stealing content from my favourite broadcaster, and because I have paid for it: stealing from me. Now get off my lawn, persuade your native/adopted/temporarily-visiting country to get better television, and get a pro-piracy story off the front page of slashdot.

Mike Bloomberg was always the business/sales guy at the company. Tom Secunda was (one of the) original programmer of the first terminals. That was all in Fortran back then. A fair chunk of it probably still is. You can read this and oh so much more in his not-very-gripping autobiography, which was required reading for all team leads and managers at Bloomberg. [Ex Bloomberger].

What's the C# runtime written in?

Why does a server that is not owned or managed by the IT department exist inside the firewall?

In my workplace that's a sacking offence.

Would the Chinese or other governments take the opportunity to create back doors into western IT networks? Wouldn't they be crazy not to?

Would the US or other Western governments take the opportunity to create back doors into Chinese IT networks? Wouldn't they be crazy not to?

If the article is explaining how lawyers are being replaced with programmers. Someone's got to create and maintain the software that replaces these "educated" people. Surely these are just a different set of educated people? That really does sound similar to the Luddites. It's not that there's no longer any demand for skills, it's that there's a demand for different skills.

And just to take an (only half joking ) swipe at lawyers, surely this means an increase in demand for brains?

Surely they're not trying to suggest that my l33tness *doesn't* make me more attractive to women?

New tech is all good, but if this is now (supposedly) even more higher res than the human eye compared to Retina, is there any point?

Can you tell the difference?

From TFA:

I disagree. Strongly.

I guess it's good that this is out in the open so we know about it, and hopefully the major browsers can all do something to help prevent it. But still: don't like, don't like at all.

How much is that in terms of the size of a more standard unit of measurement ?

I mean this as a genuine question: why is the US so far behind Europe in this?

I haven't seen a cheque in years. Is it too expensive to move everyone over to electronic transfers (surely it's cheaper to get rid of cheque processing)? Too difficult to change the habits of a large population quickly? Concerns about fraud? Plain unwillingness to change? It can't be the recent banking crisis because we had that too...

I cut my teeth on BBC BASIC back in the 80's. It was simple, powerful, let you do pretty much anything and best of all came with a built in assembler. Now that was really neat.And it just worked. It was easy to optimise individual subroutines in assembler. This was age 10. At my simple state school with a couple of BBC Model Bs in the corner, I wasn't the only one doing that either.

I make a living writing C++ now and seem to do fairly well at it. The kids coming out of university that I interview these days haven't touched BASIC, or C++ for that matter. We want them to write good C++ when they come and work for us. The intelligent ones adapt easily to working with pointers etc. The less able ones that have somehow made it through the interview process struggle.

Looks like DNS has already gone...

Searching for cryptome.org. A record at G.ROOT-SERVERS.NET. [192.112.36.4] ...took 31 ms
Searching for cryptome.org. A record at D0.ORG.AFILIAS-NST.org. [199.19.57.1] ...took 9 ms

Nameserver D0.ORG.AFILIAS-NST.org. reports: No such host cryptome.org