Posts by Ray Foulkes

Abstractiohn

I think that the root of the "rant" is that the writer believes that people contributing to open source "abstract" jobs from large companies. I.e. if the companies did not have access to the open source software they would pay someone to do the work in place of the open source. Hence "priveleged people are abstracting potential money from the unprivileged".

This of course also applies to people volunteering to do more or less anything in a corporate environment e.g. societies who run caffes in hostpitals, teams who tidy up railway stations and install flower beds, people who volunteer to help the down-and-outs. Software is one of the least likely candidates to abstract jobs since, in general, rather high skill levels are required.

It is based on the presumtion that 'there is work which must be done and it is either done by volunteers or paid for by "rich" corporations'. I find such a premise hard to swallow. The vast majority of Open source software is of little interest to corporations. That which IS of interest is often supported by companies providing staff to enhance or bug-fix problems in the open source software. As an example have a quick look at INTEL : https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/topic-technology/open/project-catalog.html

Arguments will never be won against people who decide that ever person must be categorised as "an oppressor" or "the opressed". If you have spare time, you are an opressor - full stop, even is all you do is to make railway stations a little more attractive.

Sometimes there is some good news...

We have an old Neff oven + oven/grill. The grill element failed and the rubbers around the door were sloppy. I got both from Neff, not as cheap as after-market prices, but in stock and quick delivery. Previously one of the springs on the oven door failed; once again the hinge+spring were in stock and arrived in a couple of days. This oven must be over 10 years old.. I was suitably impressed.

Algol was OK, but all wasn't plain sailing.

I programmed a lot in Algol 60 between 1967 and 1971 at the University of Salford on the English Electric KDF9. I was doing research into Computer Aided Circuit design using Y matrices. When I started paper tape was in use created and edited on Friden Flexowriters. My program was fairly large for the time and a relatively large roll of tape. There were two ways of changing the program - put the paper tape in the flexowriter and set it to copy, up to the line that you wanted to change, type in the changes, re-sync the rest of the tape and let it copy the rest OR get out the little tape splicing machine and hack out a section, gluing your amendment in. Compiling and running was effectively twice per day since you had to write out a job slip and put your tape in a box for the computer operators to load, compile and execute. Then - REVOLUTION - the kdf9 was front-ended with a pdp8 running a system called COTAN ( I faintly recall from more than half a century ago). This had a disc where you could keep your program and edit it using ksr33 teleprinters (if you were patient). Then submit your job electronically no less.

Unfortunately the COTAN system had a sort-of anti -Algol design - it was based on 80 column card images. Students were allocated a certain (insufficient) maximum number of cards. Algol 60 was not Fortran, so my beautiful indented layout of the "begin" and "ends" of the paper tape which used quite a lot of blank characters didn't fit in the allocated card space. Answer - eliminate most of the comments and the blanks. This resulted in a more or less "rectangular" program of solid text 80 characters wide - not that the Algol compilers cared but the very devil to read, edit, and debug.

I still have some printouts (somewhere) of the resulting mess together with some of the little boxes originally used to submit the paper tape jobs.

I don't hunger after the "old days" of computing.

Government dept likely culprit

Need reason to introduce licence (aka tax) and restrictions on drones.

Be careful for what you desire

It sounds great - an identity which guarantees that it is YOU i.e. a person registered with the government, a bank, a doctor who is making contact with an online service. If that is where it stopped, it would be fine. However, when politicians get their hands on the concept it turns into something quite different like the National Identity register. For that, there would be thousands of people able to access your information, 1% (on average) being criminals. It was proposed that (as a starter only) with information to be added without your knowledge and with no means of correcting or challenging the information the following (I quote):

(1)For the purposes of sections 4 and 5 “personal information”, in relation to an individual (“A”), means—

(a)A's full name,

(b)other names by which A is or has previously been known,

(c)A's gender,

(d)A's date and place of birth,

(e)external characteristics of A that are capable of being used for identifying A,

(f)the address of A's principal place of residence in the United Kingdom,

(g)the address of every other place in the United Kingdom or elsewhere where A has a place of residence,

(h)where in the United Kingdom and elsewhere A has previously been resident,

(i)the times at which A was resident at different places in the United Kingdom or elsewhere,

(j)A's current residential status,

(k)residential statuses previously held by A, and

(l)information about numbers allocated to A for identification purposes and about the documents (including stamps or labels) to which they relate.

Note that it fails to mention photos directly and the usual hassle of having to pay to update them on a regular basis.

This will permit a number of interesting consequences:

1. Criminals will be able to take your identity more easily since the information will be public (despite the governments best efforts).

2. If there is a criminal activity in or near any of the properties you have lived in, you will be hauled in front of a court to prove it wasn't you.

3. There will be many errors which you will not be able to correct - wrong addresses, wrong dates which will have nasty consequences in trying to get loans, take out insurance etc. etc.

Wouldn't it be nice if there could be an identity system which simply permitted you to identify yourself? In the uk IMPOSSIBLE - too many bureaucrats and politicians trying to create the police state.

Already in place - vodafone

Nothing to do with p0rn sites, I needed to use my Vodafone PAYG iphone as a wifi personal hotspot from Spain last week. Unless you go through an age verification step using a credit card, you cannot access NordVPN. I didn't check other VPN providers. The reason I was trying to use Nordvpn was that they had also blocked the Internet wayback machine site to "non-age-verified" people. All I was trying to do was to see what Jeremy Corbyn had deleted from his site about how wonderful Venezuela was doing - on the other hand, perhaps that is someone's p0rn

Google, a converged organisation

Don't forget that James Damore demonstrated just how much of an SJW converged organisation is Google. Take all this with a pinch of salt. I am not sure why the SJWs don't like enforced arbitration though. See

https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/thousands-of-google-employees-staged-walkouts-in-offices-around-the-world-this-week-in-protest-at-5ca76171207d

All that being the case:

I suppose https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/ is not compatible with the GDPR - oh, I forgot, governments are free to ignore it whilst simultaneously persecuting the plebs...

Don't forget to discuss..

what fuel will be used. I notice that you use the word "drive" in "drive our cars" and not "fuel our cars" i.e. get the energy to the wheels. Remember that electricity and hydrogen are not "fuels" - there are no hydrogen collectors or electricity mines. Hydrogen is currently mostly obtained from non-renewable sources (hydrocarbons) so it's use in cars is simply moving greenhouse gas emission elsewhere. Someone needs to calculate just how much more electricity the UK will need to eliminate oil consumption. Currently we consume around 70 million metric tonnes of oil per year (2016) for all uses (dunno how much in vehicles). According to www.unitjuggler.com that equates to around 850,000 Gigawatt hours in comparison with about 360,000 Gigawatt hours of electricity generated in 2016 (admittedly around 10% of that from oil). They could be powered by wind turbines i.e. using wind as the fuel. At around 6 gigawatt hour per year each I suppose we will only need around 150,000 more wind turbines added to the 8500 we already have. This is not a highly researched observation, just 15 minutes with Wikipedia and other public sources. ANY conference on replacing oil consumption in favour of carrying some other energy by electricity should have this calculation done with considerably better accuracy.

Suits the big companies

Getting patents approved, whether valid or not, suits larger companies. If challenged by another large company they "swap rights". Invalid patents are not useless, they can be used to keep all the small players out of the game since they cannot afford patent lawyers. Now, I wonder why the push has been on to grant more patents with less scrutiny?? Not that I am suggesting foul play, certainly not.

National security is not what it's about - despite the blether.

The government bangs on about security but fails to mention that the security services are only a tiny fraction of the people who will be allowed to access the collected data. I admit it doesn't go as far as the bin collectors, but not far off - what has the NHS got to do with anti-terrorist activities for example?

If the bill said "MI5 operatives only" then we can forget about mass surveillance, they simply don't have the staff - they will be kept busy by the real life threat. If, as the current proposal permits, tens of thousands of civilt servants could potentially have acccess - we are stuffed.

Paper books are almost unaffected - lack of pdf chokes me off

I know, I know, who cares about Linux users but my multi-screen pc runs Linux on which I do some development. I have been a paper and PDF customer of O'Reilly for some years, I can open two copies of the same book at different pages for referencing. I can cut and paste example code between the book and editor or indeed download the examples from O'Reilly. Do I want some other "DRM safe" on my desk with a crappy screen? No thanks.

And no, I don't pass on the PDF copies to anywhere or anyone, buy one yourself if you want it - oh wait, you can't do that any more can you?

It was a great service.Try searching for Linux support for the Safari loanshop (not that I am interested in a subscription service anyhow)

You are not alone...

My leccy meter here in France was replaced by the French smart meter "Linky" in April this year. It replaced one which had an external magnetic "antenna" just outside my house. The person reading the old meter just put their receiver against it for seconds and then left.

A month after having the smart meter installed, I received a letter telling me that "an engineer needed access to your house to read the meter" for a time when I would not be present. I wrote back explaining that ERDF (the electricity distributor in France) could easily read it remotely since it was the wonderful Linky. The reply was, of course, that although the entire village had been fitted with smart meters, the infrastructure to read it was not in place. No date has yet been given 6 months after the installation. This of course came with an offer "to optimise my energy consumption blah de blah de blah". You can imagine the scorn in the response I gave, in pidgin French you understand.

So, stupidity is not confined to the UK you will be pleased to learn.

NHS 111 - we already have it in the UK

Well, not quite as sophisticated as a bot that speaks and listens - we employ humans to read out the script from a computer screen and select from 1 of X possible answers received from the victim. (sorry potential patient). Given the extensive range of more or less incoherent accents in the UK, a bot would be one step too far; at least for the foreseeable future.

Smart meters in France - hilarious

In April, ERDF (the electricity distributor) changed my existing meter for a smart meter (after some nagging at me). My original meter was electronic and had an external "antenna" which was read by the passing meter man who placed a device over the antenna. After installation of the "LINKY" smart meter I received a message saying that a technician would call on a certain date "to read my meter". Since I had a LINKY I contacted them and explained that, despite the fact that I wouldn't be home it wasn't a problem since they could read it remotely. The reply was a hoot. Not only can they no longer read my meter from outside the house, there is no set date when "LINKY" will be linked so to speak. Meanwhile I am back to the last century of either trying to coincide with the meter reader or filling in paper slip that he leaves and posting it. Just how dumb can you get?

Nightmare..

The world is going nuts; every device in your house connected to, and accessible from, the internet is a recipe for disaster. In my house there is going to be ONE controlling device, secured as best I can, which will communicate with all the others. Those can communicate amongst themselves if they like but they are going to be firewalled off from the Internet. If devices won't work like that, then I ain't going to buy them.

Applies to governments as well?

Yeah, right.. I haven't read it but I bet it excludes governments from any consequences of either stealing or losing our personal data.

Tax on profits proportioned to turnover.

It seems easy enough to resolve the problem. The proportion of turnover (money received, not profit) in a country compared to the overall turnover of the company should be used to determine the proportion of profits that are taxed in that country irrespective of whether the company claims to make no profit in that country.

To save the small business major problems, a clearing system should be set up to determine tax due and re-distribute to governments appropriately. It doesn't matter where they declare their results, insist that turnover is split by country in the annual accounts. There are already reciprocal agreements against dual taxation.

This would involve some worldwide agreements - tricky at best and I feel sure that some tax havens will object...

Next?

"hubble detects even further galaxy created 400million years BEFORE the big bang"

ESR bashing.

ESR is an easy target for Internet commentards because of, how shall we say, his propensity to be a little more paranoid than the majority of Internauts and his consequential focus on weaponry and martial arts. That being said, his strong leadership of GPSD over the years has led to this important package to be a high quality, stable development, especially in the face of the chaos that exists in the gps receiver market. His position as technical architect on http://www.ntpsec.org means he has had to reduce his involvement in GPSD somewhat. It seems to me he is neither idle nor retired from producing code. He might not be working on the Linux kernel but there are other subjects which are important - time being one of them.

Before accusing ESR of not coding and not contributing, do a little research into what he is doing now - it is not too hard.

PS I have never met the guy...

Just one little, innocuous step...

First registration, then regulation "each drone must pass its safety test annually" - $100, then taxation - each drone must have a "flight licence" - $500 per annum (to repair broken air and to pay the bureaucrats who impose the tax), then training - "each drone operator must have his/her pilots licence" - mandatory $5000 training course, then insurance "each drone must carry its insurance certificate" - $300 per year, then RIPA rules (or USA equiv) - "every video recorded must be deposited with (insert snooping authority)" - can anyone think of any more bureaucracy that can be crammed in?

See, software patents DO help innovation

You have to be innovative to work around all the other patents! Somewhere, sometime, somebody might actually IMPROVE something whilst struggling to work around what already works.... simple innit?

Wake up app number 487 please...

It's going to get worse, much worse as every manufacturer battles to be "the one controlling everything" (and thereby calling all the shots and creaming off the maximum $$). The consequence is that everybody will have dozens of "apps" because they didn't all choose the fruit factory to automate their home. Every time you leave the house for a few hours you will spend your time with the lighting app, the security app, the central heating app, the dog food dispenser app, the cooker app, the doorbell app instead of going to YOUR app and clicking "I'm going out for the day" - previously having decided just what should happen in those circumstances. This article is just skating across the very top of a big problem (unless everyone chooses i-house of course).

Add Telephones, fax, and paper mail as well.

Somebody should propose an amendment to expand the surveillance to include all telephone calls and fax as well as all paper mail (not permitting any exceptions for anybody including police and politicians). Why stop at electronic communications? Surely the goverment and populace would be happy with that? We really have to get this minor terrorist risk eliminated - surely there is nobody in the government who would steal, leak or misuse any of this data? Surely?

Triffids - your time has come

Make sure all your triffids are well locked up...

IPv6 anyone?

Notice that this does not include provision for the sheeple. One day BT might start to think about providing IPv6 for other than big brother projects and let the rest of us in on the Internet of things.

Not much to do with Windows 8 (or 8.1)

I mostly use Linux. However I have Windows 8.1 for my CAD machine. I also look after Windows XP which runs Windows games and graphics software, mostly for my Grandson. As far as I am concerned, there is nothing wrong with Windows 8.1 as long as you configure out the MS GUI and put on Start8, Firefox, Thunderbird, GIMP etc. So why am I so reluctant to either ditch the £1000 computer running XP or update it to Windows 8.1?

Because of course there is no upgrade from XP, it is erase everything and start again. I have been putting off the hassle of re-installing dozens and dozens of games and other software (e.g. Paint shop pro) for months (years?). I suspect I will need 3 or 4 weeks of solid work to get back to the same state where most software runs smoothly on Windows 8.1 and some software not at all. I think I will put it off until June, (August?).... I know I cannot escape for ever as games manufacturers abandon XP totally. Apart from the security issue I see absolutely NO advantage to me or my grandson from doing all that work - it is just a Microsoft tax. Maybe I will put it off until Windows 9 is on offer to put off having to do it all again by a year or two.

Had MS made an upgrade path, maintaining installed software, I would have done that in a flash.

A common failing.

The problems at Nokia are common for companies in a dominant market position. Read "The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail" by Clayton M Christensen for an analysis of the problem. The position of Nokia a few years ago was classic. They had lots of R&D activities focused on the future with several competing directions, a management unsure which way to turn and an existing cash cow delivering an ever-decreasing cash flow. I would expect that the sales team, under pressure to sell what they had at the time, were less than helpful in deciding which way the development should go. With a lot of experience of the old technology they probably found it hard to focus on what to build in the swamp when up to their..... Anyway, you get the drift.

Usual useless inane ....

It'll be ignorable. Probably "Incident ahead" or "watch your speed" or "only use your own bin for your rubbish".

Here come the flood of trivial software patents

Oh dear, the European Patent office got it's green light to force countries to accept software patents in contravention of article 52 of the European convention on patents.

Thanks for the warning..

I haven't tried Windows 8 but, being an old f**t with a disinclination to drop all previous experience for a "new paradigm", I think I will wait a while before experimenting to see just how many people are like the author. If there are a lot, MS is pretty good at high speed U turns. Truthfully though I have mostly dropped Windows 7 (which runs virtual on Centos) for Linux (Kubuntu), just doing CAD and one or two other tasks on Windows 7 so (for example) I never use Windows to access the Internet.

What bothers me most though is that there are indications that the Linux GUI teams are dashing down the same route as MS and making simple things trivial to do and trickier things radically more difficult.

Wake me up...

when Nasa deploys a telescope 10 times more powerful than the previous generation, but sees nothing more than the previous generation. Every few years the universe gets billions of years older.

Just a minute - bracken is dangerous

Some species give off hydrogen cyanide in growing tips. Spores are carcinogenic.

Good job we have lots of unemployed get to work - stickers on every piece of bracken clearly needed.