Re: Well it makes sense
Speaking as a member of that set, can I recommend it to people? Start with Northanger Abbey, though!
Posts by John H Woods
3577 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Nov 2007
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21st century malware found in Jane Austen's 19th century prose
At last we know for sure. Blighty's 'best mobile network' is ...
Tuesday 28th July 2015 20:36 GMT 
Until we got rural fibre ...
my Three phone easily beat the 2Mbps of the ADSL. SWIMBO's on EE, and if she wants data in this part of Warwickshire, most of the time it has to be done by my phone's hotspot. Text and Voice no problem; but data's an absolute joke - I'd have to keep reminding myself its 100x better than Voda or I'd burst into tears.
Intel tests definition of insanity with (leaked) typoslab Skylake CPUs
Tuesday 28th July 2015 11:46 GMT
Re: The definition of insanity ...
"The quoted definition is a horribly poor one anyway" -- DropBear
Yeah, it's a particular bugbear of mine. At least it wasn't mis-attributed to Einstein, which is the usual state of affairs with this (mis)quotation. It actually seems to have come from an Narcotics Anonymous pamphlet (page 11 [25 of 68] of this pdf) which contains the more sensible "repeating the same mistakes ..."
Anyway, every time I see it, I have to complain: it's right up there with "everything happens for a reason" and "everyone's entitled to their opinion." I keep thinking there should be a pithy retort along the lines of "you clearly can't tell your perseverance from your perseveration" but I'm still looking for something effective.
Tuesday 28th July 2015 05:28 GMT
The definition of insanity ...
... might well be making the same mistakes over and over again and expecting different results --- but nearly every form of success other than 'striking it lucky' comes from trying things again and again until they work - whether it's creating and marketing products, kung fu or musical performance.
Hold that upgrade: Critical bug in .NET 4.6 'breaks applications'
Monday 27th July 2015 19:52 GMT
Classic Heisenbug?
"Attaching a debugger, says Craver, changes the behavior and usually hides the issue."
The only one I've every experienced directly in my professional career was in a mainframe screenscraper --- when logging was on, the submillisecond delay caused by writing the log entry was enough for the MF to respond, and to hide the fact that the procedure didn't wait for the response if it wasn't ready; with logging off the procedure just fell straight through and returned an empty response.
US State of Georgia sues 'terrorist' for publishing its own laws ... on the internet
The Lazarus Effect: Saved by Linux and Cash Converters
Saturday 25th July 2015 10:20 GMT
"You choosing a penetration testing distribution and complaining that the UI is not polished seems a little naive on your part." -- kryptylomese
Although I was impressed at the author's flexibility and open-mindedness, this did seem a weird choice for my-first-linux. I would agree Ubuntu Mate or Linux Mint would make a much more obvious choice --- but maybe the author needed to use someone else's "secured" hotspot :-)
Choc Factory research shows users just don't get security
Friday 24th July 2015 17:13 GMT
Re: Password managers
"Password managers don't have to be run 'in the cloud' - they can be standalone applications running on your computer, and which should therefore continue running long after the developers have gone." -- VinceH
Here's mine:
echo -n 'mymainpassword myusernameforthewebsite thewebsitename' | sha256sum - | xxd -r -p | base64 | tr 'a-m' '!--' | cut -c -20 | xclip
When my browser can't remember a password, I just run that script in a terminal, then middle key click the password input field to paste a twenty character password, with 6 bits of entropy per character. If you used the literal values in the case above it would be: 3"'MnsKA-&t74GD&,GxE
For stupid accounts that insist on alphanumeric only, replace the 'tr' command (with something like sed "s/[+/=]//g"). The script works with very little modification on windows too. I also have a version that does a non-echoing prompt for the main password, but I tend not to bother with that now unless I'm aware I may be overlooked (but it's also good if you don't want it to end up in your shell history):
read -s -p "Password:" PASSWORD && echo -n "$PASSWORD myusernameforthewebsite thewebsitename" | sha256sum - | xxd -r -p | base64 | cut -c -20 | xclip
Now car hackers can bust in through your motor's DAB RADIO
Friday 24th July 2015 13:31 GMT
Re: TBH
Olaf > the destination is 10m west of whatever you put in
Me >> <pedant_mode>I think I'm quite capable of walking 10 metres in an easterly direction when I get there</pedant_mode>
BlaneBramble >>> Not if there is a substantial obstacle 10m West (wall, lake, large drop, etc.) of your destination."
Well, when I'm driving the car myself, I have an additional gadget that warns me of obstacles unknown to the satnav, aka Mk I Eyeball; self-driving cars have radar / lidar. But my original comment was just a poor attempt at humour, I knew that 'm' meant miles in this context.
Olaf's point, though - that someone could quietly reprogram your satnav, is quite an interesting one - especially combined with control over speed, doors etc (or a self driving car), it could certainly facilitate carjacking or abduction.
Friday 24th July 2015 09:38 GMT
Re: @Mongo - Yet again poor design and great hacking reveals me as a muppet
"The real muppets are the ones whose poor programing practices allowed such things to happen in the first place!" -- Graham Marsden
I disagree, they are merely inexperienced graduates and/or other noobs. Or, quite often, they have already raised concerns only to have them airily dismissed. The real muppets are those who actually have the power to make decisions (which, in practice, always means budget controllers) on hiring, testing, and quality control.
Even a single, highly experienced and or qualified software/security engineer attached to one or more of these teams would make a difference in quality. The difference that 1st level management see is a 1% increase in their budget, so they demur. But even these managers are relatively blameless: they know that, whatever they say, those above them see only $ signs, and that if they are seen to increase their budget by 1% they are automatically regarded as failing, as no justification would be understood (to be honest, even given an audience) by higher management.
This status quo will continue until those at the top suffer financially or legally. They cannot be allowed to continue to micromanage budgets all the way down and then shrug their shoulders at the almost inevitable consequences.
HP slaps dress code on R&D geeks: Bin that T-shirt, put on this tie
Keep your stupid drones away from piloted aircraft, rages CAA
Wednesday 22nd July 2015 12:07 GMT
If flying drones near aircraft is really dangerous ...
... surely additional legislation is inappropriate, given that (a) existing legislation would appear to suffice and (b) there are, as we are constantly reminded, a non-zero number of people who would endanger aircraft on purpose.
Can't those people charged with ensuring our safety come up with some electronic counter measures and some electronics / software to trace operators?
I'm pretty sure there's going to be a market in anti-drone devices, as an anti-paparazzi measure for wealthy celebs, if nothing else. Wonder what you'd need for safe capture? Anyone fancy going into business?
Beaten blokes hate the women who frag them in online games
Wednesday 22nd July 2015 09:18 GMT
Re: Credibility
"I believe PLOS One is an 'open' journal that allows you to publish anything so long as you pay the fee. So long credibility!" -- Banksey
"PLOS ONE takes the hard work out of publishing. There's no stress waiting to find out if your article meets subjective acceptance criteria. As long as your work reaches a high technical and ethical standard, PLOS ONE will publish it - and make it freely available to a global audience."
This is not quite "anything" it just relaxes the peer-review requirement, similar to arxiv.org. It's not that one should immediately discount anything that's written there, but that one should be sensitive to the context.
Jeep drivers can be HACKED to DEATH: All you need is the car's IP address
Wednesday 22nd July 2015 06:29 GMT
Re: $5k per car, or...?
"I can believe this level of incompetence though. I am leaving my job working with 'med-tech' because the software standards I experienced made the rushed code for a mediocre game look like NASA code. The software profession tolerates a lot of idiots." -- GameCoder
The trouble is that software is not a "profession" -- it is a job. We don't need to regulate everyone, but probably those who develop safety critical systems, and possibly those who develop any internet facing systems, should be qualified and/or licensed to do so -- not so much to stop developers misrepresenting themselves, which is fairly rare, but to prevent corporations' simply choosing the 'lowest cost resources' for development, skimping on testing (i.e. avoiding any realistic or significant testing at all) and simply shrugging their shoulders when things go wrong.
Oi, #tubby! You are what you Tweet, boffins find
Wednesday 22nd July 2015 04:56 GMT
Interesting ...
but not too surprising, as it seems to match the trend in general conversation in my experience. Perhaps there's a correlation between what people post and what they say in conversation 1.0?
Pedantic note: can we please talk about "sugary" rather than "soft" drinks when talking about obesity? Very many soft drinks have negligible calories whereas some of the non-carbonated ones (including pure fruit juice and milk shakes) are highly calorific.
Ashley Madison invites red-faced cheats to bolt stable door for free
Tuesday 21st July 2015 20:14 GMT
Re: Odd modus operandi
"This isn't a Hollywood movie and most people aren't cosy with Mafia types, so that's all rather a bit far fetched don't you think?" --- Amorous Cowherder
He did say "a few dozen" let's say 3 dozen - that's one in a million users might know (or indeed be) "someone useful" Doesn't seem too outrageous to me ...
More Apple Car mutterings: Cupertino slurps more autobiz brains
Ashley Madison hack: Site for people who can't be trusted can't be trusted
Spamquake subsides: less than half of email is now processed pork
Monday 20th July 2015 08:34 GMT
Re: Phishing
"Oh, and spammers, please never learn how to spell. That would make your trash a lot more difficult to filter." -- Pascal Monett
There's a theory they do this on purpose as per this pdf: you think you're screening them out for bad spelling, but actually they're screening you out for critical thinking.
Being common is tragic, but the tragedy of the commons is still true
Horrifying MOCK BACON ABOMINATION grown in BUBBLING VATS as ALGAE
Wednesday 15th July 2015 14:43 GMT
Re: The horror, the horror
"Ate it in China, most organics are considered foodstuffs there." -- Arthur the cat
""If it has got four legs and it is not a chair, if it has got two wings and it flies but is not an aeroplane, and if it swims and it is not a submarine, the Cantonese will eat it." -- HRH Prince Philip the Duke of Edinburgh (at a WWF meeting in 1986)
Sixty-five THOUSAND Range Rovers recalled over DOOR software glitch
Tuesday 14th July 2015 09:55 GMT
Re: As I've commented previously
I can understand a car engine not stopping immediately when the key is removed, but I cannot understand why such a vehicle would lack a non-defeatable stop switch. I cannot think of any piece of remotely heavy machinery that does not have a big red STOP button on it (isn't it a legal requirement?)
Of course, you have to guard against accidental presses (I do recall an account of a noob, leaving a datacentre with a co-worker and being asked to 'get the lights' pressing the STOP switch!) but nevertheless ...
BTW, quick shout-out to all the old fogeys who remember what a BRS reset is ... or a Molly guard!
Satoru Iwata, Nintendo chieftain and gamer titan, dies aged 55
Download Festival face scan: You’re right to be annoyed, said UK surveillance commish
Monday 13th July 2015 14:48 GMT
Re: Today - faces, tomorrow - thoughts
"Hell, let's be honest, they just don't want the proles thinking, full stop. Far too dangerous." -- Tony S
"The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out... without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable." -- H L Mencken
What do you MEAN, 'Click on the thing which looks like a Mondrian?'
Sunday 12th July 2015 11:26 GMT
Re: Knowledge != Knowledge
"All across society people have instant access, via their smartphones to almost the sum total of the knowledge of the human race but it doesn't seem to be helping much." -- Phuq Wit
What amazes me is people's reluctance to consult this information. Cabbies who don't use their Sat Navs; people posting nonsense on Facebook when a 10 second search would have told them it was a hoax; people unable to learn basic concepts when a world of YouTube tutorials exists ...
Sunday 12th July 2015 11:16 GMT
Re: Anyone been tempted?
"Sorry for the swearing but I really wonder why anyone puts text in error messages as the otherwise literate cannot possible read more than one word of it, it seems." -- AC
It's not alone, but Lotus Notes in particular is rather good at popping up completely empty error messages, with nothing but an OK button -- perhaps a red X icon if you are lucky.
Sorry, say boffins, the LHC still hasn't sucked us into a black hole
Thursday 9th July 2015 08:51 GMT
Never mind more than a curiosity...
... if you could create a nice small black hole in a nice stable container, you could chuck mass in it and harvest energy given off as Hawking radiation. It would be the ultimate waste processing facility - the waste is gone for ever and the energy extracted from so doing, if you feed it just fast enough to stop it evaporating, approaches the theoretical maximum.
Thursday 9th July 2015 08:47 GMT
Re: How would we know?
This is testable - in a solipsist manner: all you have to do is commit suicide - or not - based on a quantum event (e.g. make yourself a Schrödinger's cat). At a 50% chance of not making it out of the box, by the time you've done it 5 times, it's starting to look like it's true. By the time you've survived it 10 times, it's probably true. By the time you've done it 30 times, the chances that it's false (providing your set up is correct) is about one in a billion.
Black and Latina boffins regularly mistaken for janitors, study finds
Wednesday 8th July 2015 21:43 GMT
I remember ...
... a brief stint working as an assistant to a brilliant maths professor, whose research was groundbreaking, who could teach as well, and speak about 10 languages. She also had long blonde hair, even longer legs and was quite happy to wear make up.
In two weeks, I lost count of the number of times people asked her if Professor **** was available, whilst nodding in my direction. Not a single person asked me, the assistant, if the professor was about.
Post-pub nosh neckfiller: Uitsmijter
Biologists gasp at lemur's improbably colossal bollocks
Silly Google's Photos app labelled black people as gorillas
Wednesday 1st July 2015 23:57 GMT
What neural networks think ...
Check out this Google Research Blog where they get some insight into what ANNs (artificial neural networks or "AI") have actually learned by feeding them random noise or images of clouds and (simplifying here) "asking them" to identify buildings or animals.
The identification is, without the G-word, one of dark skinned higher apes and, on a naive level, this is not really a failure: the gorillas, the chimpanzees and the bonobos are our closest living relatives. And by close, I mean really close, on a deep genetic level. The connotations of the word are terrible, but that is because of centuries of human racism, not because ANNs (or Google) are "racist". The reason white people aren't identified as such is because we are the mutants who lost our ability to produce large amounts of melanin, resulting in a very obvious visual difference: one which, to ANNs, can appear much more significant than it really is. In fact, it just means we can tolerate cooler climes somewhat better and intense sunlight a hell of a lot worse. They'll have pulled the ANN now, but I'll bet that a 'negative' of a group of white people would also have produced the same result.
Where other visual indicators are more significant, the ANN picks that. Note that, despite the subject not being white, the last picture in the tweet is correctly identified as being one of a graduation.
'Please, choose to be a good citizen and DON’T ask Siri about 9/11'
Monday 29th June 2015 11:36 GMT
Re: Silly people
"The one true date format is YYYYMMDD and always will be" -- Crisp
+1. But it confuses the hell out of bureaucrats and is impossible on many forms where they have specified the order for you. Both UK and US formats should be abolished - they are both sufficiently prevalent that, in the absence of other information, they are ambiguous 132 days per year (>36% of the time).
However, has anyone tried the ISO 8601 date on Siri? It still ends "oh nine one one," after all.
<pedant>I would perhaps replace "always" with "for the next nearly 8000 years"</pedant>
Sunday 28th June 2015 15:05 GMT
Ahem ...
... don't want to be too Pecksniffian about it, but surely when one's car is ambushed and the driver held hostage that is a serious and frightening situation and probably, even if one is something of a celebrity, does not deserve to be compared to merely having been supplied with the wrong brand of bottled water?
Who wants a classic ThinkPad with whizzy new hardware? Lenovo would just love to know
GM's cheaper-than-Tesla 'leccy car tested at batt-powered data centre
Friday 26th June 2015 21:12 GMT
Re: What a horrible paint job
"That paint job is a standard issue for most prototype cars (it's used in one form or other by BMW, JLR, etc) - I understand it's designed to make it difficult to perceive the actual outline of the car" -- Jeff Clarke
Confirmed --- I live just down the road from Gaydon and there are plenty of Jags, Aston Martins, and Range rovers to be seen with these striking line-disrupting paint jobs. Most of them go past so fast that you wonder whether the camo is strictly necessary....
Britain beats back Argies over Falklands online land grab
Online gov services are mostly time-wasting duplicates, says EU
Blurred lines, as consumer tech swallows delivery of BIG IT
Wednesday 24th June 2015 11:04 GMT
Re: Wrong premise
"The problem is 'qualified professionals' who are adamant that CLI is the only way to configure a switch, powershell is the only way to send instructions to Windows, SQL Plus is the only way to control Oracle etc etc. " -- RonWheeler
Of course you can do all those things with a GUI; automating such an approach across multiple instances is a bit of a trial though :-)
Ecobee3: If you're crazy enough to want a smart thermostat – but not too crazy – this is for you
Tuesday 23rd June 2015 08:50 GMT
Re: Does it really save that much?
"Your heating bill is driven by the heat loss from your house. The rate of loss is set by the standards of insulation, but if you see those as set, then your heat losses are proportional to the delta between inside and outside temperature, multiplied by how long the heating is maintaining that difference." -- Ledswinger
Sorry Ledswinger, I do understand the physics, but I'm still not convinced. Say at 5℃ outside, your house, at 20℃, is 15 K hotter. You drop the thermostat to 15℃ when you are out. Eventually, your house will get to 15℃ and your heat loss rate will be two thirds of what it would have been. But, until it gets to that temperature the reduction of your heat loss is less than a third. And when the heating goes back on, it has to work harder to raise the temperature of the house.
So if your temperature drops to 15 quite quickly, your have more serious problems that your thermostatic control. And if it drops quite slowly, your house is so well insulated that you may as well keep your heating on. You probably don't want to drop your temp by much more than 5K, not just because your heating has to work harder, but because you don't really want to temperature cycle your house and its contents by much more than this on a regular basis.
So, a themostat thats 5K lower when you are out can save you money, but maybe not as much as it seems. But these things have to be even better than that - because their opportunity to save you money is only when you are out and you didn't expect to be. And the most common scenario I see quoted for this "late home from the office" is only going to be a few hours of cooling. Finally, there is only a very brief period in family life when you are all out, or all in at the same time, so unless your the kind of office worker who thinks the spouse and kids should shiver along with you when you're stuck in the data centre, I just don't think the maths adds up for most situations.
Monday 22nd June 2015 12:14 GMT
Does it really save that much?
Going out on a limb here (having no central heating at all, I don't know) but does it really make much difference turning the temperature down when you're out? Surely that can only be the case if you really need to buy some insulation? Or perhaps even shut the windows.
Why is it that women are consistently paid less than men?
Sunday 21st June 2015 14:22 GMT
Re: Next question...
"You could say that it's discrimination against parenthood. I would cast it the other way around, that people discriminate more about work when they are parents." -- Tim Worstall
I agree. I was never keen on working more than my contracted hours for no additional reward before having a family; when you do have a family (or even just a significant other), additional time that you give your employer, whether for free or for additional payment, doesn't 100% belong to you -- so you have to be even more careful.
Post-pub nosh neckfiller: Nasi goreng pattaya
Saturday 20th June 2015 22:04 GMT
Re: Incredibly stupid question!
There's a difference between "left over" rice and that which has been "left out". I'm happy to keep rice till the next day when it has been cooled, covered and refrigerated. But eating last night's takeaway rice when it's been on the counter overnight, no chance. Bacillus cereus food poisoning is very unpleasant and rice is both cheap and quick to prepare: the reward to risk ratio simply does not justify eating day-old rice for most people, even if you'd be fine 90% of the time.
FLICK my FLINT and SNIFF my TREE on the streets of Naples
Saturday 20th June 2015 11:49 GMT
Re: Wacky Idea
@armyknife it is certainly the case that doorstep sellers in the UK have the same old collections of stuff. You even see the same weird items (car window escape hammer and seat belt cutter?, 'amazing' super scissors which can cut 2p coins [i.e. bog standard angled blade serrated steel sheers]).
My guess is that these people are at the bottom of various pyramids, or at any rate, simply selling anything they think they can sell which makes them a reasonable margin - it's just two steps up from begging (the next step is washing windscreens at traffic lights) and I think you are correct that the principle reason for the weird item choice is poverty.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
