Posts by John H Woods

Re: So how does this work?

No idea whether it work, but maybe adding a bit of PEG400 to the PG/VG mixture would help with solubility issues?

Re: 2Gb file?

>>How many legally obtained files do you have that are over 2Gb?

A TrueCrypt container? A zip archive? Home video? There's dozens of possibilities.

Re: Factorial, not exponential

Correct. If f(n) is n! / a^n, then think about what f(n+1) is -- It gets bigger by a factor of (n+1)/a and therefore the growth of the factorial increasingly exceeds that of the exponential as n increases.

Re: Evolution works

Yes - but the flip side means that very efficient solar cells may be hard - there's always been a lot of evolutionary pressure on photosynthesis, but it's still not that efficient.

Re: Identification problem

"surely this would require all electric cars to have a BFO "E" stencilled on the bonnet in flourescent paint"

No, it would be done like the Congestion Charge in London - number plate recognition and checking in a database of those who've paid.

Ruined it ...

Matt, you actually made sense in your previous post and presented a cogent argument. In this post you have reverted back to ad-hominems against everyone with whom you disagree. In contrast, there is some pretty decent conservative / (sometimes quite far) right-of-centre writing on El Reg, what with Tim, Andrew and Lewis, and they generally present a coherent view with which one who holds a differing perspective can engage -- and even in some cases be persuaded.

You are of course right that this is conjecture. However, your statement that this conjecture is "based on the paranoid dribblings of Internet wannabees" (whatever they are), along with your terms "Sheeple fantasies", "A$$nut" and "Snowjob", adds very little to your argument - I would say it detracts from it.

"We're offering £250/day"

"No problem, do you want me to work mornings or would you prefer afternoons?"

"

+form addressing is a very good tip, and I came here to say that too.

However, an awful lot of web forms regard '+' as an illegal character. Thank goodness for 10 minute mail.

Re: "encryption"

"compression followed by XORing with a 32 bit secret which is sent in plaintext by the server"

Wow, that is truly weird, after all the apparent effort in setting up botnets and C&C servers. So I'm guessing you would only need one unencrypted copy of any of the encrypted files, use a few different compression algorithms on it, and you'd soon have the key, even if they'd sent it securely.

I'd have paid up or given up, as I'd have been expecting to crack AES256 or something of that ilk.

"Not a great article ...

... or comparative analysis. Maybe the author was on a deadline. Maybe it was a side effect of something fun." -- Don Jefe

As is often the case with El Reg, the real insight sometimes has to wait until the comments, not the least your own. I shall bear the words of your mentor in mind when I come accross 'militarized' corporate-speak, as I have always found it quite jarring.

What fascinates me is what determines when a company can change tack, and do it successfully - I guess I'm thinking of cases like Nokia moving into mobile telecomms (and, it seems, your own company) - and when it results in a fatal split of focus. Even when a split is avoided the new direction may still end up with the company sliding into irrelevance and eventual failure. Is it mainly the foresight of those steering the organisation, or is it their luck?

Re: The real story

I've said it before, but ...

Ethnic Origin: "African"

Margin comment: "Aren't we all?"

"The problem is that technology is advancing far quicker than the laws governing it. Partly because of the speed of the developments, partly because of the slowness of bureaucracy but mostly I suspect because vested interests are far closer to the ears of our elected so-called representatives than the the electorate is."

The irony is that advancing technology like this is probably one of the few areas in which lawmakers need to be moderately active, as laws governing well established concepts like theft, assault and homicide have largely reached steady state. Yet they prefer to waste their time with endless tweaking -- or berating us about what we eat, drink or inhale.

SMS Mobile phone for the hearing impaired.

Buy mobile phone; permanently divert all voice calls to answering service; switch answering service into 'holiday mode' (i.e. doesn't take messages) and change message to "thanks for calling me, but please send me a text instead".

Re: Is it just me...

Indeed - the very first thing you learn when you start to understand cryptographic techniques is that you will never* be good enough to roll your own.

*obviously there's always a slim chance that you are a maths genius in their twenties, and maybe you will have a contribution to make in a decade or two

Re: Back to the Future?

^^ this is the paragraph that should have appeared at the front of the article :-) Thanks.

Re: You too can copywrite like a wanker...

POTW

Rouge DBA...

... I'm just loving that image

Re: A warning, not an incentive

This is my new stock response; many thanks.

Re: I'm guessing whomever came up with this....

I agree. However, although I'm more a sort of open source guy than corporate by choice (though I have to be the opposite professionally) I feel compelled to point out that change-for-changes-sake is not purely corporate, otherwise we wouldn't have had the Gnome / Unity fiasco.

Yes ...

Poor Hannah Foster, for example ...

Re: Belfie?

A bum-selfie. Don't Google it at work unless you have images switched off or work in an open-minded establishment.

Re: Waterproof kindle?

I find a resealable freezer bag perfect for waterproofing the nook when walking in the rain with the dogs. Resistive screen works fine through the polythene.

Re: Enter the metric pole?

I've always thought there should be a metric ounce and pound

1 oz = 25g

20 oz = 500g = 1lb

Unlike g and kg, which are useful for nought but salt and potatoes respectively, at least the imperial units were the right sort of magnitude for cooking.

Re: And double the fees for anything ...

It is not as easy as you think to identify "useful" degrees

Proved by the fact that many people always pick "media degrees" as useless without looking at either how much those graduates can earn (useful to student); how big the UK media sector is (useful to UK) or how hard it is to offshore that kind of work (UK media graduates therefore useful to UK Business).

The routing isn't so much forced as very strongly suggested, at least in all IKEA stores I have been in, in the UK and in Europe. Next time you go, when you get to the top of the stairs, try turning the opposite way to the main flow of people; you will find yourself in the restaurant almost immediately. There are similarly a set of shortcuts downstairs - look for doors that appear a bit official and fire door like but do not have any labels saying 'staff only'.

Re: Chorded typing!

A microwriter style chorder, that fitted in a partly closed fist, with bluetooth and a single led would be perfect for matching with a smartphone or tablet.

oops

oops, indiscrEET. Apologies, missed edit window.

Re: 50,000 Ovia users have gotten pregnant!

Surprised they're not making more noise about 36% of persons shown in that piccie.

Ok, who's the 4th one?