* Posts by John H Woods

3577 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Nov 2007

US Senator lobbies feds to BAN BITCOIN

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: But seriously folks ..

How can you ban a number ?

A DVD of child porn is also a number, albeit with a few billion digits.

Steve Jobs statue: Ones and ohs and OH NOES – it's POINTING at us

John H Woods Silver badge

Truly awful ...

... if I were an artist I'd have gone for installation art - a sculpture of an iPhone, iPad and early Mac all with working screens displaying iconic footage (e.g. that famous turtleneck picture, the macbook air reveal, etc.)

I'm not a massive fruit fan, but I can only assume the artist hates Apple.

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: Inspired by the classics

Thanks @EddieD. Now I know what a Herma is, and what apotropaic magic is. I'm sure I learn more from El Reg (usually commentards) than from any other forum.

HP: We're so down wid da kidz! Look at... er, Smithers, what DO yoof look at these days?

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: Judging from what I hear from teens and twenties these days...

You'd be suprised. My kids (15 & 17) routinely spot minor typos on posters when we are out and about. In fact, I had the gotofail code open in an editor the other day and the eldest (whose closest brush with coding is having just started doing a bit of scripting in game mods) glanced over my shoulder in passing and asked if I'd made a mistake by writing 'goto fail' twice!

This is from a teenager whose ambition is to be a firefighter: I'm sure a large dose of FPS must be increasing their observational skills!

Microsoft tries to re-invent GPS with cloudy offloads

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: More devices with geo-location?

Why would anyone with more than a few working brain cells would want this?

If I'm meeting up with my kids, for instance, its useful for us all to know where everybody is in real time: try meeting people in a post concert crowd, for instance.

I've used device GPS to find out where I left my phone several times, including once where I'd lost it in a field - might be useful for devices other than phones. I'm often curious as to the precise route I took somewhere, even if I wasn't using navigation at the time.

So much for convential GPS, but what about this? Wel, how about a low power consumption tracker embedded in valuable items? These could tell investigators, when recovered, where the objects have been. As such devices would be passive until then, they would be harder for the villains to detect and remove or disable.

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: WiFi modem geolocation

to totally turn wifi off you have to disable the location features

Can be important, because if you are using wifi to assist geolocation, but drive around somewhere where there is "open" wifi - where you can connect without a password but then need to perform a landing page logon in order to get internet access, you can get problems - your phone may drop your mobile data connection to connect to a wifi network from which it can get no information.

I discovered this driving round a university town with my GPS app failing everytime I got near a campus; eventually I realised what was happening, and told my phone to ignore open wifi.

Rise of the Machines: Robot challenges top German player at ping-pong

John H Woods Silver badge

Next --

Make the robot play with nunchucks, like "Bruce Lee" in this video

* fake footage created for a Nokia advert, but moderately impressive

Apple Safari, Mail and more hit by SSL spying bug on OS X, fix 'soon'

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: Test-Driven Development

Actually I can understand the lack of a test case for this - as you'd have to write the exploit as the test.

What I can't understand is the following:

1) why the compiler, or code coverage tool, didn't flag the final check as unreachable code, or - if it did - why didn't anyone notice how important the unreachable code was?

2) why it wasn't noticed on visual inspection - even with the apparent failure of correct indentation (which should have been automatic), surely it's reasonably clear there's a duplicated line?

3) why the programmer chose to write the code in this way? I'm not a programmer any more, as apparently I'm 'too expensive' and am now only allowed to 'create' using MS-Office products --- but this stuff is rubbish, who writes it? For a start, the 'fail' label is simply misleading as this code is concerned with resource release. There's at least three ways of writing this method in a more elegant way. I might have used non-evaluating conjunctions or nested if statements, but I can guarantee that whatever I did the return code would never have been set to success before all the conditions had been met. In fact even using reasonable logging in this code would almost have forced the author to write it in the correct way as each failure condition would have to be tested:

if ((err = SSLHashSHA1.update(&hashCtx, &signedParams)) != 0)

would probably have to be something like

err = SSLHashSHA1.update(&hashCtx, &signedParams

if(err != 0) { logger.log("failed at signed parameter check"); goto fail}

In other words, the principle failure here is conflation of the test with the assignment. We do not have to hand-optimize code anymore. I don't know why programmers even try to do it: the most important thing is correctness, then comprehensibility. Everything else, compactness, hell, even performance, comes a very long way behind those two attributes.

Terrifying photo special: 'Electric Cannon' anal orgasmo-probe in use ... on a BULL

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: Anyone Else

... almost - I just came straight to the comments!

Muslim clerics issue fatwa banning the devout from Mars One 'suicide' mission

John H Woods Silver badge

But if we could send a religious nutter to Mars ...

... surely we could send them all?

Seagate's LaCie touts a 25TB (not a typo) box o' disks for your DESK

John H Woods Silver badge

@John Tserkezis

I almost agree. But not, for god's sake, RAID5! Disks are cheaper than chips, and data can be anything up to priceless. RAID5 should be forbidden for any arrays other than those using legacy-sized disks. Even RAID6 is verging on silly these days.

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: 25TB at RAID5? ...

Did I really misread this, or has the article been amended - I'm sure I read RAID5 in the list. RAID0 is suicidal, and RAID1 can't be used with an odd number of disks, unless you are hotsparing one I suppose, but that seems silly. I'd probably run it five disks in JBOD/RAIDZ3 although I think I'd be tempted to choose 2,3 or 4TB drives.

John H Woods Silver badge

25TB at RAID5? ...

Selecting this option should result in the BIOS displaying a dialog calling you a moron and phoning home to arrange for collection by the vendor.

Snowden journo boyf grill under anti-terror law was legal, says UK court

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: That's not actually possible...

You do have rights, which come from a lot of different places - case law statute, the EU. But you don't have a single document - a constitution - a bill of rights - which lists all of your individual rights from start to finish.

This seems to say:

(1) a constitution is a bill of rights (in a single document)

(2) the UK doesn't have a bill of rights (in a single document)

(3) therefore the UK doesn't have a constitution.

The problem is that premise 1 is false. The equation of a constitution with a single document comprising a bill of rights is entirely your own invention. Although such a document might correctly be called 'a constitution' you haven't demonstrated that the only thing that can be called a constitution is such a document.

D-Wave wooing universities down under

John H Woods Silver badge

Annealing vs Quantum

Disclaimer: I used to know a bit about optimization, but I'm certainly no expert in quantum computing ...

Hasn't simulated annealing been an effective approach to non-linear optimization problems such as the TSP for decades? A true quantum computer, as I understand it, would be able to deliver *the* optimum TSP solution, as every single solution is represented in the quantum superposition of states and only the best solution 'survives' to become the answer.

I'd like to see the output of several brute force TSP solutions (I believe the record is about 85.9k cities - pdf - so a bunch of 10k tests is within the realms of possibility) compared to the D-Wave output for the same. If the D-Wave machine just produces very good results, rather than the actual best results, isn't it just annealing in hardware?

Or am I talking out of my hat?

My smelly Valentine: Europe's perfumers wake to V-Day nightmare

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: "banning cheese next, followed closely by nuts."

John G - I didn't mean to be dismissive of people with nut allergies, it's just that I think they are getting a raw deal - it's just a cop out of food manufacturers to put 'may contain nuts' on almost everything. What you really need is a label that tells you a food is nut free, but I bet nobody would dare ...

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: "banning cheese next, followed closely by nuts."

Food has to include a nut warning, and this has saved lives.

Has it though? Everything has a nut warning on it. Could have been a good idea but the warnings are so ubiquitious that they are just noise - like Website cookie warnings have become.

John McAfee declares war on Android

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: Dilemma

... so what's the dilemma?

Spam, a lot of it: Bubble tea is the Seoul of wit

John H Woods Silver badge

But I used to enjoy the various devious and imaginative ways in which some nutter in another country would try to fool me out of my credit card details through the medium of an electronic message full of blatant falsehoods that even a household pet could spot.

That used to puzzle me too, until I discovered it might be a deliberate strategy to automatically select the most gullible marks - a theory elegantly advanced in this pdf from Microsoft Research.

Facebook adds 50+ gender options: Stalking your 'Friends' just got more LGBT-friendly

John H Woods Silver badge

Will DBs have to follow suit?

The NHS Data Dictionary defines 2 sets ([gender at] Birth, [gender at] Registration) of four values (Unknown, Male, Female, Unspecified) leading to 16 combinations*. It looks like FB are extending this, although not in a formal way, to include 'current identification' which should lead to 64 combinations.

This seems overly complex to me: only medical records need to know what Gender you were born with, I can't see that FB needs anything more than your current self-identification; to me that seems to be a matter of M, F or Other (optional specification in text field). Maybe it's just the developer obsession with using drop-down lists, so you can select a pre-defined value. But I think it's quite likely that many people not wishing to chose M or F might want more freedom to describe their gender than a list gathered up by whichever developers have made a mini research project of it.

*Although, despite this all being known, some companies who shall remain nameless, think they can write medical software with straight M/F choice for a gender

'No, I CAN'T write code myself,' admits woman in charge of teaching our kids to code

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: Kids who can think ...

:-) you don't need to sell Scratch to me - I've been in love with Smalltalk, Squeak, Seaside and Scratch for years and years and years !

John H Woods Silver badge

Kids who can think ...

... can code if they want to.

Teaching children to think more effectively, however, has always appeared very low on the list of priorities of all governments - the conspiracy view might be that perhaps they prefer a more docile popuation; but I tend to subscribe to the cockup view: politicians just cannot leave education alone, so it continues to suffer the consequences of decades of misuse for partisan point scoring and electoral gambits, whilst those with any clue as to its improvement are sidelined and ridiculed.

Although I am very much in favour of teaching British kids to code, that is a view about eductation itself and applies equally to teaching them, say, history. I'm in two minds, however, about whether coding should be automatically considered an economically valuable skill. On the one hand it is probably the most offshorable skill set in the world; on the other hand much of the offshore code I have personally seen is suboptimal, and significant amounts of it comedically bad. Perhaps there really will be a market for British coders once the long-term impact of the current craze of cost-control-above-everything-else hoves into sharper focus.

Qwerty keyboards

John H Woods Silver badge

How about ...

... some kind of bluetooth microwriter? A nice little hand-shaped device that can be held in one hand and used with four or five buttons in a chording fashion. Something like a fat gun handle made of soft plastic, big enough to hold a reasonable size battery, buttons with a tactile directly under where the fingertips rest?

Flappy Bird pre-installed = £stupid

John H Woods Silver badge

Flappy Bird pre-installed = £stupid

Have you guys seen how much tablets & phones which have Flappy Bird installed are going for on eBay?

BBC, ITV gang up on YouView with 'FreeView Connect'

John H Woods Silver badge

@JeeBee

PS3 screen saver can be controlled in settings menu.

Boffins hose down fiery Li-ion batteries with industrial lubricant

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: what about over discharge ?

If you want a device that can provide high current at a reasonable voltage, it's going to capable of fireworks if you short it -- Don't Do That, Then.

NYPD dons Google tech specs: Part man. Part machine. All Glasshole

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: So much negativity.

... reminds me of the (probably apocryphal) story of John Heatherington's Top Hat:

"[he] appeared on the public highway wearing upon his head what he called a silk hat (which was shiny lustre and calculated to frighten timid people)" and the officers of the Crown stated that "several women fainted at the unusual sight, while children screamed, dogs yelped and a younger son of Cordwainer Thomas was thrown down by the crowd which collected and had his right arm broken"

--- Hatters' Gazette 1797

*NB: John Heatherington did not invent the Top Hat, and this story probably isn't true, even though that fact and this story was reported on QI.

Getting documents all too easy for Snowden

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: It's a people problem

"Access all areas" costume:

0) Attitude

1) Dark suit, smart but not too sharp, with boring tie

2) Clipboard

3) Credit card sized photocard on lanyard

4) High Vis Jacket

5) Hard hat

I reckon you can get into anywhere if you have all 6.

UK claims 'significant lead' in drones after Taranis test flight

John H Woods Silver badge

When I read the introductory quote, I wondered ...

... if there's a market for drones which kill people by stealthily dropping tortoises on their head. Maybe only works for bald targets ...

HP's hiring: UK jobs for, er, UK workers.... maybe

John H Woods Silver badge

"our priorities of cloud, big data, security and mobility"

Aren't everybody's? I have heard this mantra from a few companies. This is what it appears to mean:

cloud = any (rack in a) remote data centre hosting VMs

big data = any database too big to run under MS Access

security = the only staff who can get onto the servers are the penetration testers

mobile = apps are still the thing, aren't they?

Sony set to axe 5,000 workers worldwide as it flings PC biz overboard

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: Their market -- agreed

I shall be sending my son to uni with a nice cheap, robust Thinkpad to do proper portable work on. With the money I save I shall buy a nice monitor he can use back at digs. And maybe a nice Thunderbolt external graphics box in case he fancies a spot of gaming.

In my experience Stinkpads survive drops, spills and years of 'utilitarian' handling. They also don't attract attention. If he does break it, or loses it, I'll just buy him another. My stepdaughter's dad bought her a MacBook pro costing more than a good-enough laptop and a great gaming rig combined. It does look the bomb, but ... and I bet it's not insured.

fWHoaR! Researcher crack eternal mystery of what women want in a man

John H Woods Silver badge
Unhappy

Perfect timing ...

... as my son has just been moaning that he has inherited my square head. But I really think that if I had to look like a famous Scandinavian, SWIMBO would have prefered Alexander Skarsgård to Anders Breivik.

Dejected NFL fans seek smut after Super Bowl blowout

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: A safe-for-work blog post?

... indeed, FB refused to accept a comment with that URL.

Bletchley Park spat 'halts work on rare German cipher machine'

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: Museum of bolted stable doors

What happens if BPT fails? Do some people make some money from selling the prime development land on which it sits, by any chance?

Devs: We'll bury Candy Crush King under HEAPS of candy apps

John H Woods Silver badge

In the UK ...

... SAGA is a holiday company catering to a specific demographic. I think it is "Society for the Appreciation of the Golden Age" but most Brits think it stands for "Send a Granny Away"

ISS astronauts to grow tomatoes and rice …. IN SPAAAAACE

John H Woods Silver badge

@Vociferous Re: Of course they are safe.

Rhubarb!

Blocking BitTorrent search sites 'ineffective': Pirate Bay ban lifted for Dutch ISPs

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: Are media companies *driving* piracy ?

Case in point: Breaking Bad. Widely considered one of the best things to ever appear on TV, it showed in the UK for two seasons on FX / C5 and then you had to subscribe to Netflix to watch the rest of it.

I have no idea as to current status but I know that the UK Netflix once compared very poorly to the US Netflix in terms of content. As someone with an everything-but-the-porn (I have the internet for that) SKY subscription, I was pretty annoyed not to be able to watch Seasons 3 to 5 except with a brand new subscription to a service I wanted nothing else from, or to buy - long after air dates (and therefore critics' spoilers), box sets of DVDs or Blurays.

Want a touch-friendly solar-powered laptop? Apple just patented it

John H Woods Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: Sure smells like apple innovation in here

The trouble with your ideal lone-inventor situation is that it is now almost impossible to get a patent that will stand up by doing it yourself. If you can't afford tens of thousands of pounds for the work of patent lawyers etc there's almost no point applying for a patent.

I have/had what seems to be a patentable and profitable idea, but soon realized that I just cannot raise the the capital to bring it to fruition - and if I could raise it, I probably couldn't risk it.

The lone worker is much better off creating a work of art, at which point they can receive the full protection of the law by simply writing Copyright *Year* *Full Name* on it. Most patents are now little more than yet more gambling chips for big corporations, their investors and their lawyers.

Ancient video of Steve Jobs launching the first Apple Mac found

John H Woods Silver badge

Sensitivity to context ...

... the most important part of critical thinking; I suppose you object to the superb(ly titled) Antique Code Show, as well?

Facebook debunks Princeton's STUDY OF DOOM in epic comeback

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: Of great didactic value.

Also worth remembering xkcd 552

UK.gov: NO MORE tech deals bigger than £100m. Unless we feel like it

John H Woods Silver badge

Is this the first time that ...

... the lessons from 'lessons learned' have actually been learned?

UK.gov recruiting 400 crack CompSci experts to go into teaching

John H Woods Silver badge

The real elephant in the room ...

... is the idea of prioritising teaching kids the most outsourceable skill in the entire world.

Walking while texting can – OUCH! – end badly, say boffins

John H Woods Silver badge

"I'm all for boffinery in any guise but..."

... I'm strangely uninterested in the somewhat counter-intuitive finding that it is an *increase* in head movement that may be responsible, or that using kinematics to quantify the effects of distraction on motor control might be interesting or even have future applications.

If I may comment on your own research proposal, I think it would be useful to determine the approximate probabililty of getting into an unpleasant fracas by shouting 'Oi, Muppet!" at someone looking at their phone.

Brit boffin tests LETTUCE as wire for future computers

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: The University of West England?

@Chris W

I see what you mean ... but ... University and Polytechnic meant specific things. In particular, Polytechnics could not award their own degrees, these were certified by an external body (the CNAA, I think). I agree with you that university degrees seem to have become somewhat undervalued but I don't think we can blame that solely on the reclassification of Polytechnics (many of which were already highly regarded) to Universities.

I'm pretty sure we can't blame Labour, either - IIRC it was the Higher Eductation Act of 1992 that made Polytechnics into Universities (I was half way through a PhD at Oxford Poly when it became Oxford Brookes University, sarcastically referred to as Oxford "B"). So the change happened either under Thatcher or Major, can't remember which.

PS I was actually a bit annoyed - Oxford Polytechnic had a good reputation in my field - and the new name had no reputation at all :-)

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: The University of West England?

It appears you don't know what research is: firstly, if you had done some of your own you would know UWE is actually fairly well regarded academically; secondly, you would know that good research can get done at poor institutions (or in a garden shed) and that bad research can still get done at highly regarded ones.

I have no affiliation with UWE. If I did, it would make it easier for those with a critical thinking deficit to disregard what I have said above, although it would not, of course, invalidate my argument.

Good news: 'password' is no longer the #1 sesame opener, now it's '123456'

John H Woods Silver badge
Joke

Dvorak keymap helps ...

If I press the keys P-a-s-s-w-o-r-d on my keyboard, I get "Laoo,rpe". And if I switch back to Qwerty, "Password" comes out as "Ra;;,sho". Both of these pass muster as strong passwords on nearly every site I try.

It's also useful if you leave your computer momentarily whilst it is still logged in, it's pretty hard for your 'friends' or colleagues to do much of anything in a short time when only the A, M, and the number keys are in the same place!

EE BrightBox routers can be hacked 'by simple copy/paste operation'

John H Woods Silver badge

Pressure required...

... same old story, day in, day out. Is it not possible to sue EE for exposing one to such risks? There's got to be a project here for an enterprising law student, surely?

Even 'Your computer has a virus' cold-call gits are migrating off XP

John H Woods Silver badge

@scub

glad you mentioned that. I have played along with these a number of times to see if I can get any information that would assist in making a report. I have come to the conclusion that a lot of the staff think they are actually working for a legitimate company, and are just as much dupes as their targets.

I may be wrong, too trusting, etc, but that's how it seems to me - also explains how many of them can be so convincing.

Furtive ebook readers push Hitler's Mein Kampf up the charts

John H Woods Silver badge

Obvious choice missing ...

... Justine or anything else by de Sade.