* Posts by John H Woods

3577 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Nov 2007

In Hancock's half-hour, Dido Harding offers hollow laughs: Cake distracts test-and-trace boss at UK COVID-19 briefing

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: "......worst death toll in Europe"

Sorry but when criticicising comparisons between NZ and UK, the different national population density is almost irrelevant. I won't bore you with the biology and the maths but just consider 10,000 people in a Lunar base: the moon would make Greenland look crowded, but Covid19 would still be a very serious problem.

Facebook's cool with sharing the President's nonsense on its mega-platform – but don't you dare mention 'unionize' in its Workplace app

John H Woods Silver badge

Please explain *yourself*

"Supporting women is now considered hate speech" - no it isn't

"Twitter removes people whose opinions don't conform" - some non-conforming opinions are removed, but for reasons rather more substantial (whether one agrees or not) than nonconformity.

"Why do you post as anonymous?" - I dunno why they did, and it's of no importance to me. But I would point out that you have also posted as anonymous, so you surely you might have some insight?

"Ayn Rand understood ... " no, she didn't. There's no indication in that execrable ouvre that she had much understanding of very much at all: not even how to write well.

Sony reveals PlayStation 5 will offer heretical no-optical-disk option. And yes, it has an AMD CPU-GPU combo

John H Woods Silver badge

re: Hideous waste of resources ...

... not to mention the ensuing unecessary material (largely unrecyclable plastic) waste

Huawei's latest smartphone for the UK market costs £1,299. And yes, that's without Google apps

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: It's a marketing coup

Yep, if you like Huawei but also like thrift, go for their Honor sub-brand. Son's got an Honor nearly as good as the equivalent Huawei for half the price, and I've got a perfectly servicable smartwatch (Honor Band 5) for less than the price of a bottle of half-decent gin (£30).

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: practically worthless in about 2 years ...

... which will be exactly the right time to consider buying one!

Huawei launches UK charm offensive: We've provided 2G, 3G and 4G for 20 years, and you're worried about 5G?

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Surely ...

... sensitive data is encrypted? Are we just worried about the metadata?

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: The bigger issue is rising Chinese power

"Corbyn wasn't listed as 'unelectable', and replaced, he really did lose a free and fair election by a massive margin, to the point that constituencies which had been labour since WW2 were lost."

Not a Corbyn fan but we have to be clear what you mean by "massive margin" -- it was a massive margin in seats and really not nearly so massive in votes. I personally don't think that the fact there can be such a disparity between votes and seats is hardly indicative of "fair" elections. In fact half the seats in the UK are 'safe seats' so I think we bang on about our democracy at our peril. Our democracy is rubbish.

Developers renew push to get rid of objectionable code terms to make 'the world a tiny bit more welcoming'

John H Woods Silver badge

Never mind coders...

... can we please have management stop referring to things as the Final Solution?

Moore's Law is deader than corduroy bell bottoms. But with a bit of smart coding it's not the end of the road

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: So what's the point other that Python & Java suck at calculations?

Smalltalk is always my go-to --- 'notoriously' slow but very powerful and easy to knock something up.

1966 seconds for a single threaded effort on a aging i5 whilst I was doing something else. Come on, is Python really that bad? I was going to try to learn it!

Maybe before we try to improve our algorithms (and there's some pretty clever stuff you can do with matrices) we should ensure our languages aren't taking the mickey.

Brit MP demands answers from Fujitsu about Horizon IT system after Post Office staff jailed over accounting errors

John H Woods Silver badge

re "culture of impunity"

Yes, the establishment do seem to get away with a lot... herd impunity?

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: Heads ought to roll

IANAL but I was informed online by someone who claims to be, that where people's lives have been impacted, from stress to suicide, Crown Immunity does usually not apply. He taught me two things I didn't know: there is a thing call crown censure and also that protection from prosecution does not extend to Crown employees (and, in the process, convinced me that he quite possibly was a laywer!)

Amazon declined to sell a book so Elon Musk called for it to be broken up

John H Woods Silver badge

He is a pedo ...

Person Exporting Devices to Orbit

$5bn+ sueball bounces into Google's court over claims it continues to track netizens in 'private browsing mode'

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: Forensic analysis of Google Chrome's Incognito Mode

"Therefore, they are going to track you no matter what. "

Ok, fine. So don't have an "incognito mode" then. Chrome says:

Your activity might still be visible to:

Websites you visit

Your employer or school

Your internet service provider

It doesn't say anything about "and we [Google] will still track you"

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: Stupid web developers

So ... is there any reason why pro-privacy groups can't mirror those frameworks on other servers where the request isn't tracked? (no sarc, genuine question - I just don't know)

Devuan Beowulf 3.0 release continues to resist the Debian fork's Grendel – systemd

John H Woods Silver badge

multiple monoliths

systemd, snap and even the Linux kernel itself all seem pretty monolithic to me. Is this the new "microkernel" architecture, then, made out of a few big blocks?

I'm very far from being anything like an expert in OS matters so perhaps someone can assist my understanding ... If systemd provides all the essential services userspace needs to make effective use of the Linux kernel, why isn't it part of the kernel? On the other hand, if it's important that these sorts of services are kept separate from the kernel might that not imply they should be kept separate from each other and not all bound up into another monolithic layer?

Privacy activists prep legal challenge against UK plan to keep coronavirus contact-tracing data for two decades

John H Woods Silver badge
Joke

Re: Optimists

Dido Harding DOES have a really solid reputation when it comes to PII

As anti-brutality protests fill streets of American cities, netizens cram police app with K-Pop, airwaves with NWA

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: "Yes, Anon activists are back."

I can well believe criminals could find the money for a Greyhound to an area where they thought they would be able to commit larceny, or even felony, with relative impunity. But it seems to me unlikely (although I am open to persuasion) that anybody is paying them: first question: Cui Bono? second question: why hasn't anyone already spilled the beans on these secret networks?

80-characters-per-line limits should be terminal, says Linux kernel chief Linus Torvalds

John H Woods Silver badge

I agree ...

... but I quite like alternate line background shading when lines get >100 chars or so - like we use in wide tables. Thank goodness for stripes.el. What, we don't all use emacs as our terminal? Ok, just me and a few emacsists ...

Trump issues toothless exec order to show donors, fans he's doing something about those Twitter twerps

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: Thoughts and prayers

(this might be a whoosh but ...) Gaslighting means trying to undermine other people's perception of reality: presenting false information to people in a manner which makes them doubt their own memory, understanding or perhaps even sanity. Etymology is from the play "Gas Light" by Patrick Hamilton in which the protagonist interferes with the gas supply (used for lighting) to his house to convince his wife that her perception that everything is getting darker was her encroaching insanity.

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: Simple Response.

I have both the same recollection and the same apathy regarding this issue.

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: Worst American president ever

The USA is climbing the deaths / million faster than the UK at this stage in the pandemic, although you are correct in that, according for some national adjustments for 'start point' the UK is actually the worst in the world.

Laughing UK health secretary launches COVID-19 Test and Trace programme with glitchy website and no phone app

John H Woods Silver badge

Anybody's guess....

... my guess is that, if they use the {Goog|App}le solution they won't get all that lovely data they want.

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: do grandiose brandish

I think the Telegraph Crossword compiler discovered the best anagram so far:

Easily survives travel north to castle... A disaster for this contrary advice? (4,5; 7,3,5; 4,5)

(The anagram of EASILY SURVIVES TRAVEL NORTH TO CASTLE is (Rot13)

FGNL NYREG PBAGEBY GUR IVEHF FNIR YVIRF

HP Ink sales are in the red: Total revenue down 11 per cent as CEO says coronavirus knackered supply chain

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: Just thrown out an HP inkjet ...

Well, I haven't thrown it in the landfill, it's gone in the "will be components when I can tear it down" box :-)

Bits I can't use will go in the WEEE skip and I have replaced it with a mono laser I rescued from someone else's skip :-) I'm green and mean.

John H Woods Silver badge

Just thrown out an HP inkjet ...

... because no-one, not even HP, has a black cartridge for it. There's a couple being ransomed on ebay for more than the price of the printer.

Microsoft blocks Trend Micro code at center of driver 'cheatware' storm from Windows 10, rootkit detector product pulled from site

John H Woods Silver badge

At no time ...

... that's a pretty sneaky way of saying "at t=0..."

Help your fellow IT pals spruce up their virtual meetings: Design a winning background, win Register-branded gear

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: no webcam

I keep a shutter over mine because I look like Anders bloody Brejvik. Fortunately he is fading somewhat from memory... I just hope he doesn't escape.

Linus Torvalds drops Intel and adopts 32-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper on personal PC

John H Woods Silver badge

zit

hurrah, i'm not the only one who detests flesh-coloured mics

Microsoft drops a little surprise thank-you gift for sitting through Build: The source for GW-BASIC

John H Woods Silver badge

every byte mattered ...

I still remember when I realised I could do FOWIA (find out where I am) in Z80

POP HL

PUSH HL

RET

with one fewer byte:

POP HL

JP (HL)

meaning my subroutine was just E1 E9 instead of E1 E5 C9. I have some vague memory that E9 was originally "undocumented" - does that ring a bell with anyone?

*Yes I had to look up the hex, it's 4 decades since I could program by POKE addr,byte (at 14 it was easier to memorise the instruction set than find the money for an assembler).

Das reboot: That's the only thing to do when the screenshot, er, freezes

John H Woods Silver badge

Hilarious...

... but I wouldn't claim that I have never clicked on a screenshot

PS: best example I have seen was my young niece (2yo, I think) trying to do pinch-to-zoom on a picture in a book ...

For the price tag, this iPad Pro keyboard better damn well be Magic: It isn't... but it's not completely useless either

John H Woods Silver badge

boro parmo

<sarc>Thanks</sarc> mate, I'm now homesick and hungry.

Campaign groups warn GCHQ can re-identify UK's phones from COVID-19 contact-tracing app data

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: Numpties!

Some scepticism may be required, but https://bylinetimes.com/2020/05/20/dominic-cummings-billion-dollar-brainchild is a bit of a worrying read.

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: Thank you

Not sure where you get your figure of 1450. So far, worldwide, 14% of closed cases have ended in death, so you'd need about 200 undiagnosed cases for each case to justify that figure.

Furthermore, in the UK, the official death toll is currently 36042. The estimated excess mortality is in the range of another 20k, so probably at least 50k UK brits have died already: if the UK population is just under 68 million that's already more than 1 in 1360, and I suspect we are nowhere near the end of the UK death toll.

Most importantly, even if you a right, I think it's perfectly reasonable to have privacy-compliant* contact tracing on a temporary basis to save thousands of lives. YMMV.

*obviously this does not include the UK proposed app

Apple, Google begin to spread pro-privacy, batt-friendly coronavirus contact-tracing API for phone apps

John H Woods Silver badge

re: should be self-isolating

The whole point is that they will just know that identifier 817398714354652 should be self isolating and isn't - they won't know who it is.

John H Woods Silver badge

BLE isn't really "Bluetooth" in that respect

Former Labour deputy leader Harriet Harman calls on UK govt to legally protect data from contact-tracing apps

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: Oh what a tangled web we weave!

Help me out here, guys. We have people who think the Nazis were left wing? Really?

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: Oh what a tangled web we weave!

"labour lurched so far to the left that Hitler would have recognised them as a party he could work with"

Eh? I think you may be confused!

Rogue ADT tech spied on hundreds of customers in their homes via CCTV – including me, says teen girl

John H Woods Silver badge

I have a bit of sideline ...

... in rural CCTV systems: watching your barns, horses, etc. First thing I tell any potential clients: any system that gives you the convenience of seeing your camera feed over the internet is - unless we are going to lot more money (and still no guarantees) - going to be visible to at least someone over the internet. You need to double check the frame of all fixed cameras and perhaps even put physical shields on PTZ cameras to ensure they can't see sensitive areas even if they can be moved remotely.

Of course, most horses aren't that bothered about cameras (until one girl got enthusiastic and tried to remotely talk to her horse via the camera speaker!) but it's not unusual for a time-pressed groom to piss in the straw they're just about to take to the muck heap, rather than trek to the nearest toilet. Most of them couldn't give two hoots whether you see them or not, but you've got to make sure they know the cameras are there. (Of course I also have to explain to the stable owners/managers that such cameras absolutely may not be used to check on the work of one's staff).

That string of supercomputer hacks last week? Of course it was a crypto-coin-mining get-rich-quick scheme

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: CPU cycles

ah, I see, thanks very much.

John H Woods Silver badge

CPU cycles

Don't most HPC tasks consume lots of CPU? If you compromise the account of a known userA who runs the known taskB, how will you know that the task isn't doing what it says it's doing: surely you just see the processB, owner userA, at roughly where you expect in the process monitor?

This sort of hack could be very damaging because it's not just compromised accounts - what if they've compromised some of your code? Every time you run it you get bogus results ... and someone else gets cryptocurrency.

EDIT: I know nothing whatsoever about HPC, although I'd love to.

SAP proves, yet again, that Excel is utterly unkillable

John H Woods Silver badge

Not affiliated in any way, but ...

I urge anyone with doubts about excel to have a go at Quantrix, the successor to Improv. YMMV but I absolutely love it.

Podcast Addict banned from Google Play Store because heaven forbid app somehow references COVID-19

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: AI is rubbish, developer doesn't read emails?

Best podcast app going. I don't want to have to sideload, but I will if I have to.

Huge if true... Trump explodes as he learns open source could erode China tech ban

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: "Grounded in Truth"

... like your comments, here, Bob, that

a) it's less dangerous than the flu

* time passes *

b) it's only as dangerous as the flu

* time passes *

c) it's only about 50% worse than the flu

* time passes *

You don't seem to be saying too much about how it's not such a big deal now, which is something, I guess.

If American tech is used to design or make that chip, you better not ship it to Huawei, warns Uncle Sam

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: Also Microsoft

Not a fan of Mrs T., especially not her damaging lingering untruth that a national budget is just like a household budget, but fun fact: the UK actually acquitted themselves pretty well in the Falklands, both operationally and morally. There was a bit of controversy about the Belgrano but, in 2003, Captain Hector Bonzo, in a Nat Geo documentary, claimed that he was readying for attack, and that the sinking of his ship was entirely concordant with the "rules of war"

Vint Cerf suggests GDPR could hurt coronavirus vaccine development

John H Woods Silver badge

conservatives and liberals ...

... that's an interesting proposition, got a citation?

Mirror mirror on the wall, why will my mouse not work at all?

John H Woods Silver badge

re: Midget Porn Collection

Well, hard disks were smaller back then ...

Got a few spare terabytes of storage sitting around unused? Tardigrade can turn that into crypto-bucks

John H Woods Silver badge

interesting ...

... I have a couple of TB of RaidZ2 knocking about ... It's on a BSD though. At the moment it is Wake-on-LAN to save on electricity but if someone else could contribute towards the cost of keeping it online, I could fix the minute long latency to start it up!

Danger zone! Brit research supercomputer ARCHER's login nodes exploited in cyber-attack, admins reset passwords and SSH keys

John H Woods Silver badge

if you can get into that ...

... you can probably mine some cryptocurrency!