* Posts by John H Woods

3577 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Nov 2007

OH DEAR, WHSmith: Sensitive customer data spaffed to world+dog

John H Woods Silver badge

"It is a bug not a data breach." The first part of the sentence is true, the second part is an outright falsehood. I do not understand how organisations are allowed to get away with making such statements.

Another chance to win a 6TB Western Digital Black hard drive

John H Woods Silver badge

"Stop calling me SOME PIG"

Back to school: Six of the smartest cheap 'n' cheerful laptops

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: Don't forget second hand options.

+1 for old ThinkPad T4xxs. You can even add an eGPU to get an Alienware-thrashing gaming performance when plugged in back at the dorm, and a reasonable 24" dorm monitor / TV is a very cheap addition too. Away from the dorm you get robustness, easy repair as you mentioned, and a boring looking laptop that will be near the bottom of the pile in attractiveness to thieves.

Drum roll, please .... Results are in for the collective noun for security vulns

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: Wait, more than one collective noun?

"A set cannot be a member of itself" -- DavCrav

(Apologies to Bertrand Russell and the very large set [or class] of people whose maths is better than mine if I've got this wrong but I think that ...)

... this is equivalent to saying that "the set of all sets that don't contain themselves" is the same as "the set of all sets" But clearly, because the set of all sets does contain itself, your statement is self contradictory.

In practice I seem to recall it is undecidable - you either say you are working within a system where sets can contain themselves (ZFC) where the ZF refers to Zermelo and Fraenkel and the C stands for 'Choice' (as in the Axiom of), or you say that you aren't.

Bonus AofC joke:

Q) What's yellow and equivalent to the Axiom of Choice?

A) Zorn's lemon.

The Raspberry Pi is succeeding in ways its makers almost imagined

John H Woods Silver badge

"unusable to people who are red-green colorblind" -- Michael Wojcik

Did you mean red/yellow/blue button? That's hardly unusable to the colourblind once you know which button is which finger. Unlike the (still) unusable pastel shades that are the defaults for much of Excel graphs and Powerpoint templates.

John H Woods Silver badge

A Smalltalker who cannot easily write in any other OO language (OK, they might tut and sigh a bit) doesn't really know Smalltalk. There's almost no language in Smalltalk (three reserved words) and almost no syntax --- it's virtually all paradigm.

John H Woods Silver badge

"Scratch is an introductory concept kind of thing" -- werdsmith

Under the hood it's Smalltalk; an, or rather the, OO language that puts almost everything that came afterwards to shame.

Google robo-car suffers brain freeze after seeing hipster cyclist

John H Woods Silver badge

"They often refer to nearside and farside though to designate a side of the car"

ITYM nearside and OFFside, And we use the left in the UK for the same reason we mount our horses from the left, it keeps one's sword / lance arm free when mounting and available to engage oncoming traffic when riding!

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: It does seem somewhat ridiculous to have one's feet fixed to the pedals...

"It does seem somewhat ridiculous to have one's feet fixed to the pedals...if riding in city traffic." -- Fraggle850

... Or, indeed, in the country. Slowing for dog on a transverse vector, I wobbled into an electric fence and lay there with my feet fixed to the peddles getting a blast of twitching every two seconds as the fence continued to operate normally. My wife and sister in law almost injured themselves laughing.

French woman gets €800 a month for electromagnetic-field 'disability'

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: KU the pedants

"I can't see what the role of the pedants is." -- KC

It's a pun: Ku band; cue the pedants (as in "cue the music") where Ku and Cue have similar pronunciation.

The most tragic thing about the Ashley Madison hack? It was really 1% actual women

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: Why the percentage shock?

"while women are programmed to choose a dependable partner who sticks around." -- Archivist

Speaking as an erstwhile geneticist, that's not strictly true. There's a considerable advantage to women to play it both ways, and significant evidence that they do. The optimum mating strategy for a women is to become impregnated by an extremely attractive (and likely promiscuous) male and then have her family provided for by some dependable saddo with material resources who is unlikely to cheat.

Does Linux need a new file system? Ex-Google engineer thinks so

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Re: Sure, why not.

"But what if she's _really_ annoying?" --AC

Or FAT?

Shingled drives get SpectraLogic archive down to 9 cents/GB

John H Woods Silver badge

"

" ... it's likely out of the range of most people reading this ..." -- Lee D

Quite possibly, but unlikely to be out of the range of all of the clients that many of us are advising ;-)

PINs easily pinched with iPhone-attached thermal imaging kit

John H Woods Silver badge

Surely the solution is ...

... IR illumination of keypad? Maybe slightly warming the whole pad would do it?

Geeks on quest for world's most pointless YouTube video

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Re: Ridiculing and bullying

"I do not believe anyone should be publicly criticising and ridiculing what others do, no matter how pointless or inane they find it themselves. The worst of it is that they are going out of their way to find stuff they don't find worthy and encouraging others to do the same." -- Jason Bloomberg

+1 Satire <> Mockery. I have had to have words with muscular poseurs in the gym for taking the piss out of my fellow fatties. As far as I'm concerned, if you've got the bandwidth for this nastiness you aren't working hard enough.

Computer Science GCSE male dominated, but geekettes are ready to rise

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: Sexist, but joking = Sacked

I didn't support him being "sacked" because it's not how academia should work: the #distractinglysexy response from female scientists was much better.

Nevertheless: there's a bit of a difference between being apparently serious and being obviously ironic; there's a bit of a difference between being a satirical news source and being a brand ambassador for an institution; and there's a bit of a difference between being fired from a job with teaching time, lab-time and a salary and being asked to resign such a non-salaried brand-ambassador role when you've put your foot in it big-time and embarrassed your brand.

Boffins raise five-week-old fetal human brain in the lab for experimentation

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: Get a grip

"Who here remembers that horrid day when, after 9 months of being cosseted in the womb, you were squeezed violently through the birth canal to feel for the first time the pull of gravity, cold, hunger and fear? The answer is non[e] of you. We are are the product of nurture. These proto-brains are no more human than my 5 month old finger was a human when in the womb." -- smartypants

Without either agreeing or disagreeing with your sentiment, I feel obliged to point out that this method of classification would also make the brain of the average 2 year old a 'proto-brain'

Dixons Carphone still has 7.5k Windows XP EPOS systems

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: security taken extremely seriously

All utterances of "We take our customers' security extremely seriously" should go on record, resulting in an automatic doubling of any data protection fines eventually incurred. If the statement cannot be made to count for something, all journalists should simply refuse to report it.

Oracle to certify its database v.12c for Windows 10

John H Woods Silver badge

Virtual machines?

I'm not expert enough to make much sense of my search results, but I was under the impression that ORACLE support had a few limitations when running on VMs -- specifically that they will not provide support for any issue that is not known to happen on native O/S unless the user can demonstrate that the issue is not related to the use of, for instance, VMware.

It's not quite 'insisting on physical machines' but it does seem to me (again, not an expert) that this may be a bit of an out-dated attitude. Would much appreciate comments from the knowledgeable...

Digital doping might make you a Tour de Virtual cycling champion

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: FFS

"You missed this?: "Each device scored one of the three pockets in the back of my club jersey. I couldn't turn them on and off simultaneously, but started and stopped each within seconds of the others." --- JeffyPoooh

You're right, I did miss that. But it's still only one run per device, so whilst my off-the-top-of-my-head suggestions for variance were wrong, I think my complaint about the test method still stands. Several runs with the same three devices are needed to determine what the intrinsic variability of each device is before meaningful comparisons can be made between them. Otherwise you end up with the "Which? effect" where, because one particular washing machine, vacuum cleaner etc. outlasted another, they mistakenly think they can form judgements about longevity of each model.

John H Woods Silver badge

FFS

All journalists should go to science, or at least stats, school. Not only are the discrepancies here effectively negligible (you really didn't think GPS was millimetre perfect, did you? I was actually amazed about how close they were!) but as you've only done each run once you have no idea at this stage whether the variability you are observing is due to the runs being different (different times of day, different 'wiggle' from the precise route, or even just random error) or whether it is significantly different between the devices.

IT jargon is absolutely REAMED with sexual double-entendres

John H Woods Silver badge

"Oh c'mon, nothing about abort, kill, peek, poke, inject, grind?" -- oldtaku

Or Wang Laboratories? Or the 'nix finger? Dongles?

Skills crisis? Not for long: More and more UK kids gain STEM quals

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: The CIA World Factbook

... is a pretty well respected online resource; I suspect that is why you've collected a few down votes.

John H Woods Silver badge

"so-called" skills shortage is right ...

Looking at the advert on the right ...

New Business sales: £80,000

SC Cleared Planning Engineer: £43,000

Magento Developer: £35,000 - £40,000

You'd be better off spending 3 years and £30,000 learning golf, as I see no sign of the UK's distinctly anti-meritocratic culture fading.

Blacklists miss 90% of malware blogged IP love

John H Woods Silver badge

Dangerous subnet ...

... just avoid 0.0.0.0/0 and* you should be OK

*and disable IPv6

Stop taking drug advice from Kim Kardashian on Twitter, sighs watchdog

John H Woods Silver badge

"Err, doesn't that link in the article deserve an [NSFW] tag ..." -- 1980s_coder

and maybe an NSFB tag, too!

Boffins: The universe is DOOMED and there's nothing to be done

John H Woods Silver badge

oh well ...

sudo shutdown -h 3000000000000000000000

Oracle pulls CSO's BONKERS anti-bug bounty and infosec rant

John H Woods Silver badge

"just noting that on a strictly economic basis, why would I throw a lot of money at 3% of the problem..."

Well, on a strictly economic basis, until you've established that the 'lot of money' is actually greater than 3% of the problem, the question is meaningless.

Indian carriers forced to send TXT for every 10 megabyte download

John H Woods Silver badge

@Raj

"What's the point of responses that go 'this sounds like a bad idea because <insert completely unrelated use case for another much more data-intensive country>'" -- Raj

Sorry, Raj -- I think many UK readers will find the idea of the government making a quick fix response to protect consumers from telcos such an alien concept that it will make their heads spin. As it was a quick fix, I don't suppose there's much to stop them refining the rules quickly in future as circumstances change. But from the point of view of someone who lives in a country where the 650 idiots in the building with the clock couldn't come up with a useful, even if somewhat flawed, regulation within the lifetime of one parliament, it's very confusing!

Introducing the Asus VivoMini UN42 – a pint-sized PC, literally

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: Linux?

"I've been looking to build a small under-the-tv unit for my dad. My current parts list comes to £250 based around this case and an AMD Athlon 5350 or its 1.6GHz, slightly cheaper sibling. The barebones version of this Asus is very tempting as an alternative, but only if I can make it a: run flightradar24.com smoothly and b: play home movies smoothly across the network." -- Martin an Gof

I've got (a) and (b) working pretty well on a Raspberry Pi2. If you want a Wintel box though you could buy a laptop with a broken screen off ebay, £250 seems pretty pricey to me.

Safe as houses: CCTV for the masses

John H Woods Silver badge

The trouble with these things ...

... is that, given past news, they are probably better at letting intruders look at you than vice versa

Moronic Time cover sets back virtual reality another 12 months

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: The only way to not be ridiculed...

Reminds me of the old joke about when the French Resistance didn't have enough guns and new recruits were given broomhandles for training. But one day the Germans surprise them and the poor old noob has to defend the secret bunker with nothing but a broom handle. Bizarrely, he finds that taking careful aim and shouting "bangety bang!" is actually *working* and the oncoming hordes are dropping like flies. However, there's too many of them and they are nearly upon him. That's where the bayonet training kicks in and, amazingly, poking the chaps in the ribs and shouting "stabety stab" seems to be doing the trick. On all except one attacker; he just keeps rolling on towards our plucky hero. Just as the latter is about to be literally trampled by one remaining slow moving assailant trundling impassively towards him he shouts "Hold on, why aren't you dead?" The German replies: "Clankety clank, I'm a tank"

Testing Motorola's Moto G third-gen mobe: Is it still king of the hill?

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: No compass...

"I doubt any touchscreen works well in the rain." -- tacitust

My Sony Xperia Z3 seems to work fine in anything but the heaviest rain.

Samsung looks into spam ads appearing on Brits' smart TVs

John H Woods Silver badge

front projection

Agreed --- Most 'home cinema' is just 'big telly' - but with a small amount of effort you can get a projector to give a truly gorgeous image of any size you like. You don't even need to have a home cinema room. When our projector is off, it just looks like we have a modest 23" IPS monitor to display one of the inputs (SKY / Pi / PS3 / Wii). The projector only dominates the room when it is on - which is when you want it to.

You don't even need an expensive projector - I got this 720p SONY 3LCD one off ebay for a hundred quid. OK it's not as good as my sons' Full HD / 3D Optoma, but it produces a great picture (and warms the room in winter)

Windows 10 wipes your child safety settings if you upgrade from 7 or 8

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: ...We all know that porn is found in bushes...

"Hedgeporn, like public phone boxes and state pensions, will be an unknown pleasure to current and future yoof...." -- Tim Jenkins

Well, they certainly don't have to go outdoors to find it! But weirdly I still come across it walking the dogs --- I've actually found digital hedgeporn, too in the form of DVDs!

Biggest security update in history coming up: Google patches Android hijack bug Stagefright

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: Re asdf: Incredible!

"so rolling out an update to hundreds of millions of devices doesn't seem to be an industries first..." -- OliverJ

I hear what you're saying but It's not the count, it's the diversity. The hundreds of millions of devices which got IOS8 were what, about half a dozen SKUs?

Sengled lightbulb speakers: The best worst stereo on Earth

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: inside out

"I can't help but feel that it would have been better to add light output to loudspeakers, rather than vice versa." -- artificial bitterness

I have a sudden nostalgic vision of Sound-to-Light systems from Tandy

Nearby exoplanets circle naked-eye-visible star

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: denizens of city centres (who deserve what they get).

"The idea of a post-midnight switch off was briefly floated here before being roundly shouted down as irresponsible and dangerous by the local think-of-the-children brigade" -- AbelSoul

What? Which members of this brigade let their children out after midnight? Here in rural Warks, our lights go off at 00:00 (01:00 on Sat and Sun) and it's marvellous. In fact, the only downside is that I didn't know they were going to do it: first night it happened I went out with the dogs, stumbled over the lead of the electric lawnmower that I had, ahem, left out and, almost as I did so, all the lights in the village went out. Took me a second or two to work out what had happened ...

Global spy system ECHELON confirmed at last – by leaked Snowden files

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: @Pascal Meh.

"Sorry, but when you have people blowing themselves up and killing people... I'll accept limited snooping if it means I can sleep safe and bomb free." -- Ian Michael Gumby

We have pretty much established that limited snooping does not mean you can sleep safe and bomb free, so your statement isn't really very useful. Do you mean you would accept vastly more snooping, i.e., the amount that would allow you to sleep safe and bomb free? I think the amount of snooping required to achieve that is effectively unlimited. Or do you mean that you won't accept any snooping at all if it doesn't allow you to sleep safe and bomb free? Both positions seem ridiculous, but if you don't hold either of them your conditional statement is effectively content free.

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: @moiety

"... but I'm pretty sure that the technology is still being developed ..." -- moeity

Trouble is ... the maths is already developed, so it really doesn't matter what you do with the technology. There are too many people and too few terrorists, so if your false positive rate is anywhere near the realm of the possible you will have far too many leads to follow (a "99.99% accurate" test would give you 3,000 leads in the UK alone - it would take something like 30,000 field operatives --- and probably another 10,000 support staff --- to keep an eye on them 24x7).

See base rate fallacy and/or paradox of the false positive

Windows 10: Buy cheap, buy twice, right? Buy FREE ... buy FOREVER

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: Kudos for the 1970's music reference

"ITYM lobotomised" -- Stoneshop

Indeed. Both my teenage boys requested headphones for birthday presents, cue trips to hifi shops to try them on, and one trip to HMV to try Beats. Both boys said the same thing "Are these faulty?"

I put them on. OMG, do people really like that? It just sounds like nextdoor's music turned up way too loud. I have not heard any genre of music, hip hop included, that sounds better on Beats than any similarly priced offerings from Sennheiser, BeyerDynamic, hell, even Bose.

HP insists 'we don't have a global dress code' – while deleting one from its website

John H Woods Silver badge

"Just a t-shirt???? That might draw a crowd depending on who's wearing it" -- Mark85

theoatmeal.com/pl/minor_differences4/shirt

The Q7: Audi’s big SUV goes from tosspot to tip-top

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: Deep Joy

"Plus they don't fit into parking spaces" -- AC

Almost nothing fits into parking spaces any more -- they are like bus seats, still being made to fit the sizes of vehicles and backsides that were around in the '70s and '80s.

Gay emojis? GAY EMOJIS?! Not here in Russia, comrade

John H Woods Silver badge

New Emoji request ...

... muscular bare-chested male riding a horse; holding an AK; wrestling a bear etc.

No, Microsoft: Your one-billion Windows 10 goal is just sad ... really sad

John H Woods Silver badge

"...unwanted act of fellatio..." -- AC

<pedant_mode>

ITYM 'irrumatio' -- an unwanted act of fellatio would be something else: "Hey! I *really* didn't want you to wake me up like that ... etc"

</pedant_mode>

Derelict TrueCrypt Russia portal 'is command hub for Ukraine spying op'

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: When the developer...

"When the developer says, "So long and thanks for all the fish!" while also saying "Don't use this" there's probably a reason for that." -- Bob Dole

This is a version with a back-door. That doesn't mean the original version has a back-door (or that it doesn't). The TrueCrypt goodbye message looks a lot more like a warrant canary than anything else.

Hurrah! Uber does work (in the broadest sense of the word) after all

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: Again?

Principally as a result of Tim Worstall's articles, I have actually found myself reading Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations" It's hard to recommend this too highly -- it's a very rewarding, if not entirely straightforward read. It is especially interesting how he railed against allowing special interests too much control, or even just influence, over governments. In particular, he talks of "corporations" which, as I understand it, then referred to businesses who use government law to restrict competition in order to gain financial advantage --- that would seem to describe the medallion issue in the article perfectly.