You lucky git ...
... I look like an infamous Norwegian maniac
Posts by John H Woods
3577 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Nov 2007
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Live or let dial - phones ain’t what they used to be
Idaho patriots tool up to battle Jihad with pork bullets
Friday 28th June 2013 10:52 GMT 
Re: So much for respecting the religious beliefs of other people.
You totally missed the point. What is your interfaith dialog but simple respect of each other? You don't believe in Allah, they don't believe in Jehova. Neither of your religions allow for a dualistic approach where you are both worshipping the same God. You can say you respect their religion but really you are dissembling.
I similarly count people of all beliefs amongst my friends, including the moon hoax and cost-effective off-shoring I mentioned.. Doesn't stop me believing they are completely wrong and that their beliefs are stupid. I'm just honest enough to say that their beliefs don't make any kind of sense when seen against what I know to be true.
It is the monotheistic religions themselves which say "my religion is the only way" - it's just that each religion's shouty bigots are less embarrassed about saying so. Your diplomacy towards believers of other faiths does you credit, but plenty of antitheists like myself have read your holy books and we KNOW what your religions say. They are not mutually compatible beliefs, at least some of you are wrong, and to my mind you all are. And more importantly if you are a Christian who thinks Islam is a valid belief, you are probably breaking your own rules - they are there in black and white, e.g. Commandment 2.
Friday 28th June 2013 09:04 GMT
Re: So much for respecting the religious beliefs of other people.
+1 Jake. People deserve respect, beliefs don't.
If they believe my disrespect of their beliefs(e.g. one the Abrahamic religions; the moon landing was faked; offshore coding is cost-effective) is a disrespect of them as a person, then that is just one more belief of theirs that I do not respect, but I will continue to try to respect them as a person.
How City IT is under attack from politicians, diesel bugs, HR
Korean doctors: Smartphones really ARE doing your head in
Thursday 27th June 2013 10:44 GMT
I agree...
... the same is sometimes true of Gaming. My kids are Fallout crazy, they were always playing it. But they've spent the last 6 weeks creating their own levels, learning how to script things, editing 3d meshes, etc. Now they want help building a tips&tricks website to host some of their own content. Is this brain-destroying? I doubt it.
You need to let kids be kids. Same with horses - there's a degree of control you need to exert, or everyone gets hurt, but control-freakery will get you nowhere fast - possibly causing lasting damage.
Boffins create tabletop ANTIMATTER GUN
Charlie Miller to tell Vegas punters how to hack your car
Tuesday 25th June 2013 09:39 GMT
True but ...
If I understand it correctly, this would enable you to fix equipment to a car that would stay undetected for an arbitrary period and later allow an attacker to remotely take control of a vehicle on a high speed road, disable the breaking, accelerate to full speed and then deliberately crash. Difficult to do that with a spanner.
Apple's Tim Cook: I'm risking my own MEELLLIONS if we sink
Passphrase vs Masking
Monday 24th June 2013 15:34 GMT
Re: Passphrase vs Masking
Hi Phil, thanks for the answer.
But I think I don't need blobs when typing on my laptop - any sufficiently well positioned observer / camera can see what I'm typing. Blobs make me feel happy about entering my password with other people watching - which I shouldn't.
As for fingerprint readers, they are a nice idea but cheapy laptop built-ins are pretty terrible. I think they can be defeated by someone lifting your prints from a glass with tape and then simply scanning the tape.
Monday 17th June 2013 16:33 GMT
Passphrase vs Masking
One of the problems about using a passphrase instead of a password is that once you have become aware you have mistyped, you often have to start again from the beginning. My favoured solution is a a check-to-unmask*, but I was wondering what you guys would think of a compromise where spaces show up as spaces and everything else shows up as * or the standard password blob.
*actually I prefer it to also default to be unmasked.
US DoJ: Happy b-day, Ed Snowden! You're (not?) charged with capital crimes
Google staffing boss: Our old hiring procedures were 'worthless'
Friday 21st June 2013 16:39 GMT
A long time ago ...
... my mentor and first manager in IT Consultancy (after I left academia) ... told me that the point of an interview was often misunderstood - it was social, rather than technical. According to him you
1) select CVs that match well (use technical people to read them)
2) interview to find the people you LIKE, and feel you could get on with in a team. His interviews appeared to be no more than a relaxed chat, but you'd be amazed how many loons could rule themselves out with ill-chosen statements or strange behaviour.
3) mention that you have a 1 month probationary period; the last 3 guys got the chop during that period, and that you are really glad to meet someone who does have the skills they claim to have and who can stay the distance. if they are still interested you give them the job.
4) if they are rubbish, you sack them very quickly and call the people you politely rejected last time.
You *cannot* find out what someone knows in an interview for any remotely technical role, and you can't solve this with harder or longer (5 days!) interviews. You can find people you LIKE, and if you find their abilities do not match what they claimed, you can sack them. Because you used step (1) you can sack them on the grounds they lied on their CV, which is pretty much a humdinger, and no tribunals result. It's much harder to sack people because they don't get on with the team - although these people cause a lot of damage, even where they are individually capable.
Kim Dotcom victim of 'largest data MASSACRE in history'
AXE-WAVING BIKER GANG SMASHES into swanky Apple UK store
PC makers REALLY need Windows 8.1 to walk on water - but guess what?
TypeScript 0.9 arrives with new compiler, support for generics
Boffins build headless robo-kitties
Desperate Venezuelans wiped clean of bog roll
Young blokes blinded by video-game addiction: THE FACTS
Interwebs taunt Sir Jony over Apple eye candy makeover
1-in-10 e-tomes 'are self-published'... most are 'rubbish' says book ed
Online music world on iRadio: Apple, imagine our concern
PM Cameron calls for modern, programmable computers! (We think)
'THINNEST EVER' spinning terabyte beauty slips out of WD fabs
Sneaky new Android Trojan is WORST yet discovered
Saturday 8th June 2013 09:40 GMT
Re: Non-problem? Hardly.
The privileges are not granular enough. You don't have the option of installing an app with some privileges, so you either accept full access to SD card, or you do without the app -- No option to chroot an app to subfolder on the SD card, You either accept access to the camera or you do without the app -- no option for "ask me each time". This would also be useful with "services that cost money"
There is also, afaik, no log of which app invoked which privilege and when, so there is no auditing. So, in my experience, although I don't like it, the accept permissions step of most apps I'm interested in is pretty much just one more click you have to make.
Students outraged: Computer refuses to do any work for entire week
Kinky? You're mentally healthier than 'vanilla' bonkers
First 'adult' app for Google Glass planned 'within days'
Give porno danger classes to Brit kids as young as FIVE - parents
Monday 20th May 2013 13:22 GMT
Re: Internet, video games, movies, music, all just a little bit of history repeating..
Peter Jones 2: "do your damn job."
As a parent and step-parent, I can hardly express how much I endorse this. The main thing that kids need to avoid is - having kids. Parenthood is intensely rewarding but frustrating, onerous and serious. *THAT* is what children need to be taught. By teaching them that sharp things cut; hot things burn; that all drugs - from weed to crack - are (implicitly equally) dangerous; you are really teaching them that it is the school's place to teach this --- and that, years later, school will also shoulder the burden of it when *they* become parents.
Monday 20th May 2013 13:09 GMT
Re: Out lawing porn
The story of King Cnut is applicable in either case: either the informal version where a stupid king cannot stop the tide, or the probably more correct version where a wise king demonstrated to obsequious courtiers that even he could not stop the tide. The point is simply that no-one can stop the tide.
Cnut, ironically, appears one of the names likely to be filtered ...
Last time CO2 was this high, the world was underwater? No actually
Monday 20th May 2013 09:41 GMT
Re: Really?
A "mere" 3 million years? The Himalayas were not around until the dinosaurs weren't: Everest is probably only about 60MY old (~20 times older than this) and it is now over 8.8km above sea level (~250 times more movement). Almost all human development has happened in the last 10% of this time, so just because you can say it quickly, don't forget to really think about how long it is.
Biological chips go analog to boost efficiency
Thursday 16th May 2013 08:37 GMT
Re: We're building a volume knob on your radio...
It is not useful to say that there is no such thing as analogue simply because things are, or may be, discrete at the Planck level.
In your example, there is such a scale difference between water as a stream of drops and a stream of molecules (which may have different masseses, due to having different isotopes of H or O), that the fact that the reality may be digital at the very smallest level is essentially irrelevant.
Murdoch hate sparks mass bitchin', rapid evacuation from O2, BE
Wednesday 15th May 2013 14:30 GMT
Hmm....
Might be in a tiny minority here, but (despite loathing Murdoch) I've never had a problem with SKY. Broadband often a bit sluggish in peak periods, but never any problem with Customer Service or the Engineers. That may be in part because the house has 3 boxes and everything-but-the-porn subscription, so my monthly bill is substantial, or perhaps I've just been very lucky. I just wish it wasn't part of the Evil Empire.
Hex & plugs & ROM & roll: Computer music stars rock Bletchley
You thought only Google dodges UK taxes? So do all the Brit firms
Samsung sends gigabit '5G' signal TWO WHOLE KILOMETRES
RTFM! NSA tome reveals THE TRUTH behind spooks on the web
Excess all areas
Standard Model goes PEAR-SHAPED in CERN experiment
Brit unis get £7.5m of taxpayers' cash for cybersecurity PhDs
Thursday 9th May 2013 15:10 GMT
"Doctoral Course" ?
As I understand it (from doing a PhD back when Noah was a lad), a PhD is not a "course". I was explaining to my kids the other day why, in in general, only felons and weirdos have more than one PhD. Once you have one you have established yourself as someone who can do research - there would be no need to do another one, you could just do another 3 years post-doctoral study, doing research, attending conferences, publishing papers, and maybe teaching students, without writing another thesis (quite often the least valuable form of academic writing). Of course there are honourable exceptions ...
If this were a postgraduate course, I would be sorely tempted. I have always wanted to work in this area, but my career seems to have wanted to go in a different direction.
Suspected Chinese NASA spy smuggled smut not state secrets
Japan's XP migration solution: Remove network cable
Fraudster gets ten years after selling fake 'ionic charge' bomb detectors
Friday 3rd May 2013 07:31 GMT 
Without minimizing the tragic consequential loss of life ...
... I'm just amazed that these were in use without people realizing they were divining rods. Not only in the swinging action of the rod but in the extravagant claims (they could detect *anything*; they worked from the air; they worked on tiny amounts; they worked at enormous range; they worked through shielding and deep underground. Indeed, the only missing claims that a standard dowser would make is that worked even over maps).
No purchaser can have bought them without knowing either that (a) they knew enough science themselves to see it was bogus or that or (b) they knew so little science they needed to consult with someone who could do (a). Buyers were, at the very best, criminally negligent, and at worst, part of the conspiracy.
Further (though not that far) down the chain of command it is clear that many people knew these 'detectors' were total bullshit (I believe that was the word used by an Iraqi Lt) and yet more blame must lie with all those who ignored the shouts that the emperor was in fact naked, whether involved in the purchase or not.
Facebook: Yeah, we'll ban chainsaw beheading vids - when journos call us
Research explodes myth that older programmers are obsolete
Thursday 2nd May 2013 07:42 GMT
Re: Keep current or become unemployable
Daniel Voyce: "... use tools to increase my productivity (such as MVC Frameworks) ..."
What is MVC in this context, Model-View-Controller? As written about extensively in Smalltalk-80 about thirty years ago? Despite what the recruiters and the managers think, most of the abilities one needs to be a good developer, and to stay up to date with new trends, would have been familiar to the Ancient Greeks: mathematics, logical reasoning, and a life dedicated to continuous learning and intellectual development.
Is the IT industry short on Cobolers? This could be your lucky day
Wednesday 1st May 2013 11:44 GMT
No offence, Dominic, but ...
... isn't this sort of keyword matching recruitment part of the problem?
Maybe if recruiters (not just the agents, but the employers themselves) used people who actually had some technical nouse to decide who gets to do what, we would solve not only the recruitment problem but the software crisis, where we are drowning in absolute rubbish.
But I never submit my CV to recruiting agents, simply because I have never found one that can apply the simple filter of never asking me to do a job whose salary is less than my current one.
Not cool, Adobe: Give the Ninite guys a job, not the middle finger
Wednesday 1st May 2013 07:55 GMT
Bravo!
"Reader, Flash and Air are - alongside Oracle's Java browser plugin - the screen door through which the raw unfiltered sewage of the internet oozes into the homes of netizens. These products are awful, the security is worse and the management of them over the years beggars belief."
I have never seen this sentiment better expressed.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
