Posts by John H Woods

Re: And this is why the Aussies are on top of it

"Most people complaining about the governments handling are actually complaining about the conservative party's handling of it because they support the Labour party."

This is doubly invalid. Firstly, they are entitled to complain whomever they support, whether anarchists / communists / fascists / people's front of Judea. Secondly, having complained, the validity of such complaints has nothing to do with their motivation.

Pretty crass to suggest that people only care that the UK is managing this so poorly because they "want to score political points" - I think that's called Poisoning the well.

Re: Cloud is a joke

I'm conflicted ... I somewhat disagree with the first part of your post and somewhat agree with the latter!

Re: Good security will always need some user action

It's good practice, sure, but all nhos people around you don't know so much. I think we need to tackle it at an institutional level.

All 4

Presumably that means it's not accessible with iDevices?

Re: their recondite portion

Hold on, is this the bit that belongs to a German techno artist?

Now that's recondite knowledge. Twice.

Re: Not unusual

I dunno, given the Talk Talk data breach and their famously woeful customer service, I'd pretty much say that their users are a self-selecting sample of absolute numpties. Hmm, I need an ISP, I know, why not these guys, they've won worst UK ISP of the year loads of times!

Re: We know what you did ...

Bob: "The study appears to fall in line with another recent study that estimated that as many as 270,000 Californians are infected with the coronavirus, or 0.69% of the population. That’s more than 10 times the number reported. It calculated that 4.8% of the U.S. population was carrying the disease by early April, 39 times higher than reported, and that nearly half of New Yorkers were probably infected."

If that were the case the infection rate of New Yorkers would be dropping. Also there would have been a lot more serious cases a lot earlier - unless the virus somehow ramps up in stealth mode and only then do you get a proportion of people needed intensive care.

jcmh makes a similar mistake: "covid19 official stats are bullshit since (according to WHO) 80% of cases are mild or no symptoms ... So real mortality rate is up to 5 times less than official one"

he's suggesting that their stats on that can be trusted but their analyses can't, which is very odd. You know, people who study pandemics who realise that 80% of cases are asymptomatic are probably going to construct their models on that basis?

Re: Actually ...

Ok: I can see that looked a bit like I didn't realise a lot of ordinary people are suffering with poor connectivity, mea culpa, I didn't really mean it like that. I live in a small village outside Stratford upon Avon and get about 50Mbps down 10 up, and on EE, about 100Mbps down and about 20 up - so I'm lucky, and well aware that I am, especially given what I've had to put up with elsewhere.

No: what's confusing me is just how poor some of the connections are to some pretty senior politicians and journalists. You get a view into some rather splended, probably London, houses and, especially in the case of TV journalists, I'd just think they'd have decent connectivity? Maybe I'm even luckier than I thought I was.

Re: The usual dismal acronym making

Our transatlantic bretheren seem particularly fond of the DOOM (riDiculously tenOusly cOntrived acronyM) - all their political Acts have seem to have these cracker-pun titles.

Re: "Careers where colour blindness may be beneficial"

Oh, I didn't see that there.

Re: Real world

... in the real world there is a spectrum between Communism and Ayn Randism

Bill Gates, Covid19 and 5G

On which note, I found this rather amusing

Re: "We are going to be very strong on food supply."

"The same WHO that insisted, in the face of all evidence, that covid 19 wasn't human transmissible as late as january?"

The mental gymnastics of Trump supporters are even more breathtaking than usual. If the WHO is to be blamed for delaying too long*, what are we going to say about a leader who was still claiming, as late as 26 February, that "Because of all we’ve done, the risk to the American people remains very low. … When you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero. That’s a pretty good job we’ve done."

---

* actually I've seen a warning from them of Human - Human transmission as early as 10th January, and I'm sure that I don't have access to privileged information unavailable to a global superpower

email provider who shut up shop ...

... not email, but you're not thinking of Truecrypt are you?

Re: Eddy Ito: "how many lives are being saved ... fewer folk on the roads"

Fewer RTAs have to be balanced by the fact that the health and emergency services are stretched, so that there may be lower capacity to deal with the (undoubtedly) fewer RTAs.

Regardless; the death toll from Covid19 is probably going to be pretty massive. In the three days since Bob posted that it might be comparable to seasonal influenza, the USA (which suffers seasonal flu deaths estimated by the CDC at 12-60k per annum) has seen its Covid19 death toll rise from under 15k to over 20k. I don't think that has ever happened in a USA flu season, and I expect the total death toll to exceed this bracket certainly within a fortnight, possibly 700 millifortnights or less.

If Covid19 is not the biggest killer in the world this year, I will be most pleasantly surprised, the slight stigma of being publicly wrong notwithstanding.

Re: Peak District

The plural of virus is not viri, so I assume you are not a biologist, consequently I suggest you might need to cite sources to justify your claim about what conditions they can survive. I'll go first: some other dangerous members of the Coronoviridae (SARS and MERS) can survive nine days on hard surfaces (e.g. JHIN). Not all hard parts of a car get "baking hot" in UK weather, even on a clear blue day in April.

Any unecessary movement of people or objects is clearly not a good idea in a pandemic, especially in a country where we aren't doing contact trace & test when we diagnose cases. Even if they don't touch anything on this journey they will need to refuel the car at some point - sooner than if they hadn't made the journey. They are increasing the risk of an RTA when resources are stretched, and even the possibility of needing mountain rescue. And it's difficult to get into National Parks straight off the motorway - nearly all routes require some travel on minor roads through villages.

It's boring, I know. We usually take our dogs to all sorts of places. But unless they really cannot be walked to and from your own property (behaviour issues or you live somewhere, perhaps temporarily, where the dogs you have cannot be exercised), stay the fuck at home. Perhaps the police can be considered to have overreacted to this one incident in and of itself, but I'm sure the TV footage will have made some people think twice about treating lockdown as a holiday.

Re: Why do so many businesses seem to need video?

ovation1357: "I've found that using video has really helped to put people more at ease with the situation"

Actually, that must be the answer. I suppose I (like a lot of us) are not really an average case, having been doing substantial telework for years (and years...)

Re: Why

Sounds like you've got a blocked nose. #stayindoors

Re: allow some disaffected jerk to create a virus with high contagion and high mortality

Really not that easy, and probably quite a bit harder than 3D printing a minigun.

Re: in my roughly 30 years of using IDEs

I would agree: never could see why anyone though Eclipse was any good.

But then I'm so old fashioned I don't think the old Smalltalk IDEs like VW, VA and now Pharo have ever been beaten ;-)

Re: Confused

(ahem, taking it at face value) ... It's not for tracking individual users, it's for gathering statistics about the relative mobility of the population.

Re: Perfect Timing

If Dyson ventilators become de rigeur, then ear defenders will have to be added to the PPE list.

We don't really need a new design. There are already manual ventilators and a Pi, a touch screen, and a servo motor would go a long way towards turning such a thing into a basic automatic ventilator.

Re: 2 meters

An Aussie friend assures me "If you can smell their fart, move further apart"

But the best advice I've had so far is that people should not cough near you. They should be far from you. If people cough near you, tell them to far cough.

me too

I'm thinking 10 4U units in a full height rack, 60 x 16TB HDDs in each, thats a 10PB rack weiging about 1 tonne and taking, what, in the order of about 5-10kW?

So yes, two dozen racks, not half a dozen.