Posts by Nick Ryan 3756 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
1. IoT will go mainstreamI don't know ANYONE who really gives a toss about smarting their house up. I know I don't.
It really depends on what you mean by smarting their house up, for example:
I'm quite happy having fitted a light above my front door with a sensor that automatically turns the light on when it's dark and motion is sensed - both the darkness threshold and sensitivity can be adjusted slightly which was a nice touch. In many ways this is "smarting my house up", what it lacks is any form of network connection (I don't give a rat's arse about an Internet connection, just connectivity of some form).
What I'd quite like is an automatic curtain opening and closing system. Smart enough so bedroom curtains are either only opened manually or at a specific (later) time in the day if they're not open already, but otherwise to open curtains based on sunrise and a configured fallback time of day. This level of smart is pretty much hopeless for locally managed devices (e.g. physical access with buttons and dials - you can image just how disgustingly awkward these would be to configure) , however being able to manage all of the devices using an intuituive interface would be useful. Again, I don't give a rat's arse about this being "Internet" enabled, local network controlled is just fine thanks...
They didn't mention vibrations... (could be visible)
Grab hold a robot and proceed to blast it with a variable range of vibration frequencies until you find the one that causes it the most problems. Then lock onto that one and turn up the power...
OK, there's the possibly downside that you come across a really well built robot or you shake your own robot to pieces, but, whatever!
Thanks - I already spoke to them, and they said it kicks off in early March. That's why it's too late to get something together from scratch.
That's not an insurmountable problem. El Reg should just call on the services of Captain Cyborg, arm him with a variety of plastic spoons and perhaps a tooth-pick or two if we're feeling generous and drop him into the arena. Possibly from a great height?.
It's a win-win situation.
You missed a bit regarding the 'instructions'. They should be in every language imaginable (except English of course), prefaced in as much legalise 'it's not out fault' boilerplate as possible and should fold out to at least a few square metres. The exact same 'instructions' (as in nothing instructional, just legal disclaimers) should be on a sealed CD that's also marked 'instructions'. Safe packaging of these is expected of course, along with picking and packing slips for each.
And I understand the hate. However Drupal itself is very flexible and can be very good.
Unfortunately there are some serious problems, a lot stemming from the core developers who can often be politely termed "asshats" who in the past have been so blinkered and elitist that they didn't care for suggestions or improvements unless they came from within. This has improved but there's still far too much of it...
Documentation - the general response is "go read the source code". Erm, if I wanted to do that I wouldn't be looking for documentation would I? While there is some good documentation, unfortunately most of it is utterly appalling and you're left having to a global source search to find usage of the methods/functions and guess from there. And that's if the method/function is actually used in the source you have, or hasn't been obfuscated through the module system. Basically unless you're an expert in PHP then you'll find the documentation mostly useless but you'll be left admiring where all the CPU cycles have gone to perform very little of real benefit (Drupal 8 is an improvement on this front).
Without turning this into a rant, I've found that the best way to work with Drupal is:
1) Try to do everything "the Drupal way" - even if it's not quite the way you'd like to do it, it will save you a huge waste of time fighting it. Working out what "the Drupal way" is in a given situation is not always easy though given the pathetic documentation but often it does come with a lot of benefits.
2) Use as few modules as possible. It should be very obvious that the more modules you drop in the worse site performance will be but this doesn't stop some folk from doing this. As posted above, it's often that you find a module does 90% of what you need but lets you down on the other 10%. Sometimes this isn't a problem, others you may need to put some custom functionality in and a moderately experienced PHP developer shouldn't have a problem with this. This doesn't help hopeful end users though but in reality this isn't any difference to WorkPress modules except it's slightly easier to resolve with a PHP developer.
Do these people not realize that this devalues everything that they publish?
No, because they are absolute morons(*). Any little extra bit of cash dredged in, no matter the source, is considered a "good thing". Very similar to the morons who think that having placing adverts on your own company's website is a good thing (unless that's the business you're in of course).
* Only outclassed on the level of being a moron by those that believe any of these "stories". Unfortunately repetition is a key part of brainwashing and the more that the gullible see these "stories" and see them repeated on other websites the more they believe them.
Same here, I loved the game.
However the biggest disappointment was the consistent crash at the end of the game when you completed it on the hard(est) game mode. Unfortunately like many games it involved learning the AI and countering it using and abusing it's actions and responses.
Modula-2: A fine example of idealist attempts at creating a programming language... a language that wound up either utterly useless or having to be hacked so it was capable of doing anything useful but was no longer the "pure/idealistic" vision that it started off as. One of the biggest stupidities was the insistence that single pass compilation was the only way forward and everything was nailed in place around this concept regardless of how this crippled code or code organisation.
Something like that. As far as I can remember all nominet have ever cared about is getting cash and it always felt like their other aim was to do as little as possible in return. They actively seemed to encourage domain squatters and coincidentally there were more than a few financial links between the execs at Nominet and various domain squatters. When they saw the cash cow of .co.uk domain sales tailing off, which it will naturally due to saturation, they unanimously decided to push more .uk domains onto the market effectively blackmailing organisations into buying them in addition to their .co.uk and/or .org.uk domain names. Nobody (sane) actually wanted the new domains, but that didn't matter.
Not forgetting all the other wonders of Blu-ray that are apparently very, very important for, well, on broad average nobody at all. So we can have multiple commentaries, different endings and different angles all of the same riveting storyline. Not forgetting the directors cut and the making of featurette as well.
That will happen only if his ticket doesn't accidentally get canceled or the flight is <ahem> overbooked and he gets bumped. I wouldn't even want to think about lost luggage.
How will he be able to tell if this happens if it's because of his reporting this bug or just business as normal for UA?
That and every iterarion of their "improved" webmail experience makes the entire thing more and more horrible to use. In general, everything Yahoo designed is User Unfriendly Software, effortless falling off the wrong end of every metric of usability, accessibility and just plain common sense.
While they claim to keep access to the old versions alive, in reality they just cripple the old version and effectively force users to switch to the "improved" new version because they have no choice.
Upgrading from any prior version of Drupal to Drupal 8 will cause serious sense of humour failures amongst everyone involved. Guaranteed. While the core Drupal development team are somewhat better than they were there's still an unpleasant ivory-tower syndrome there and if you can't mind read and predict the future then whatever you build, or have built, will not be easy to update. The more plain, vanilla your installation the easier it will be upgrade but for many situations I'd honestly consider just recreating the site than attempting an upgrade.
It's not that Drupal 8 isn't heading in the right direction, it's been steadily lagging more and more behind other CMSs such as wordpress when it comes to backend usability and ease of use but IMHO there's still a very long way to go. The underlying changes in Drupal 8 will make this transition rather easier and hopefully swifter.
Agreed, it would be best to manage and control the data lookups. However from experience there are far too many clueless designers and developers out there that struggle with the basic mechanisms of providing the data and frankly have no comprehension of in depth security. If you don't build (good) security in from the very start it's likely to be a ball-ache to retro-fit and just as likely to be forgotten as "new stuff" usually takes priority.
another "hang the gunmakers, not the shooters" supporter eh?
I read it that those responsible for the security of the personal data failed miserably in their responsibilities and therefore they should also be investigated in great detail and punished appropriately. Simply blaming the perpetrator, or perpetrators, is not acceptable as we don't live in a trusted, wholly open society therefore there is responsibility for the protection of the personal data that was provided in good faith and legally protected.
As it's traditional to include real-life metaphors (or is it similes? can never remember) - if you leave your front door wide open and somebody comes in the door and makes off with your property then you have a certain degree of responsibility. While it's true that it needed that somebody to come in, you made it easy through carelessness. Try arguing with your insurance company that it wasn't your fault your car was stolen if you left the keys in the ignition and the door open...
...and which county is London in? That's the most common balls up so many websites make. And this doesn't just affect London either.
Interestingly, the Post Office, does not treat county as part of a postal address and they haven't done so for quite a few years. This is partly down to simplification but also to avoid problems when county boundaries arbitrarily change. And yet many websites still insist on county for postal addresses...
Now if I could slap the tossers that insist that credit/debit card numbers must be entered without any spaces (because it's far too difficult to strip spaces out of a string of numbers of course) or the eejits who have month names instead of numbers for valid from and expiry dates on the same cards. Gah!
Chemicals, then?
Yup - generally speaking everything is a chemical. It does depends on your definition of "thing" though. The distinction between "natural" and "non-natural" is astonishingly vague. Table salt: dug out of ground = "man made and nasty", extracted from the sea "natural and nice" all the while being the same chemical. Yes, there are different trace elements and mined salt has more trace elements removed and often non-clumping additives added (which are generally better for you than the salt itself) but that's it.
Also important not to confuse common American pork with meat. There are more chemicals and other nasties forced into American pigs than are even remotely sane. This youtube video shows are pretty sane report on it (there are a lot of nutjobs associated with the reporting of factory pig farming).
I've never really understood why when driving you never(*) suffer from motion sickness. Doubtless it's something to do with concentrating.
* There's always an exception: I've felt motion sickness when driving a Renault Twingo (not sure which year / model). The most hateful, idiotically designed vomit wagon I've ever had the mis-pleasure to drive.
There is *always* a volunteer to take point.
They are otherwise known as your "crumple zone".
On a continued point: it is critical that if you drive a white, grey or silver vehicle that you must not, under any circumstances, turn your lights on when it's foggy. :-/
IANAL but my wife worked in the "interesting claims" department of a leading motor insurance company. If you leave the keys in a car and it's running then you are responsible for it. For example if you leave the engine running and (automatic) gear engaged and your dog jumps onto the accelerator, then the last driver is responsible for what happens next.
Stick it on the white guy and have a giggle.
And much more apt. There were far more non-black (e.g. white) slaves than there were black slaves - call them "indentured servants" or whatever you want, they were still slaves. However that doesn't ring well with the popular culture that (evil) white people raided Africa and made away with black slaves. The fact that the European powers tended to buy the slaves from black Africans (i.e. they sold their own countrymen or enemies) or that black slaves were apparently treated better and were more valuable than white slaves because they were harder workers doesn't matter jack. There are also a lot of stories where the slave owners treated their slaves very well indeed, much better than is usually portrayed - discovering this kind of humanity makes for some good reading even if they make for appalling popular culture.
History. Sometimes it's quite interesting to read what actually happened and its comparison to popular or hollywood culture.
They basically decided to "do an IBM". As in screw the core developers every which way they could and instead focus solely on "enterprise". While utterly failing to appreciate that the biggest reason their tools were in use in "enterprise" environments was because of the number of developers using them.
It also didn't help that various versions of the RAD Studio IDEs were so unstable that they were barely useable and their previous fixation with the aberration that is/was the BDE.
And what makes you think that the various media players used by the browsers aren't full of different holes? Any good player will try and offload the decoding to the GPU and this means that privilege escalation is always possible.
There's no guarantee, of course, however the surface of attack is considerably smaller and rather importantly doesn't involve Adobe. When a plugin, e.g. one initially designed to provide nothing more than a simple augmentation of a website but extended mercilessly and thoughtlessly, has access to the entire client system and particularly when Adobe is involved any problem is much more likely to be serious compared to what's likely through a "simple" (hahaha) video decoder.
Agreed. Finally.
I'll be very happy when I can use the BBC's websites using something other than a security hole propagation system.
I've had flash uninstalled for my main PC for a few years now and, partly thanks to initially Apple then others, there are steadily less and less websites that rely on Flash.
True. The intersting point as well is that many of the systems supplied into hospitals are/were designed as utility systems and are not expected to be connected to the Internet. Unfortunately the lure and convenience of network connectivity for devices to communicate is strong and therefore many of these devices had network connectivity patched in later. Again, not the most serious of issues when within a trusted network however as soon as even one node is the network is not trusted, the entire house of cards falls down.
There is also the very real point that these systems were sold to solve a problem, not sold as an ongoing maintenance burden for OSes to be continually updated, applications supported and defences put in place for changing connectivity. As such, many are "sell, install and forget" type systems.
For what it's worth, when I was in this industry one of the first things I did was insist that our systems (often private networks) were segregated from the wider network through a hardware firewall which only permitted specific communictions through. While this doesn't protect our internal network from the situation where an engineer introduces a virus to one of the systems, it does protect the wider network. Many thanks to MS and their virus deployment auto-run scheme which even if you turned the bastard off, still auto-ran unless you had XP SP3 installed. Gits. However our internal network was also safe from whatever unpleasant things happened elsewhere and given the state of much of what we saw, we were very happy to be segregated.
No need. Scumbag lying toads like this are advertising, and paying for their space, on hundreds of supposedly "reputable" websites.
The sheer anount of complete lying shite that is linked to on otherwise not entirely unreasonable websites is ludicrous. Think all the targetted lies of "5 tricks millionaires don't want you to know", "<local area person> makes <x>£ a week from this", "miracle slimming tricks that your doctor doesn't want you to know", "how to get the latest iDevice for only £1" and the slightly more benign but still outrageous, "you wouldn't believe what happened next in these holiday photos".
And the problem is, the more this shite is present and seen the more it is perceived as being "true".
If I were to partake in such underhand computer use such as accessing torrent sites, I'd use a minimal software Linux VM. Makes it pretty tough for windows executables to run when there are no windows libraries and makes a mockery of popup windows "errors".
A purely theoretical situation of course and there are plenty of legitimate uses for torrents.
The "Sales of Goods Act" is more correctly titled the "Sales of Goods and Services Act". However Microsoft are correct that computer software, as a licenced service, is not covered by the act as there is the technicality that the software itself is in the digital domain and therefore a copy of it is provided, without such a licence for the copy the customer would be in violation of copyright. (Note to the F.A.C.T. bullshitters: this would be a violation of copyright, never theft). So in some ways what you're really getting with software is a contract exempting you from copyright violation of the software.
On the other hand the provision of this software is a service itself and is therefore covered by the Sales of Goods and Services Act, with the details around how much this provision extends into the software and how much is the supply of the software. For example if the medium that a company such as Microsoft supply the copy of licenced software on is found to be faulty or deficient, this is definitely covered by the Act. However beyond this point it starts to get very messy on the legal front with activations, licencing servers, product support terminations and so on.
Anybody would have thought that the legal system hasn't noticed the birth of computers and is 50 years out of date...
Safe Harbour (harbor for USAians) is and has always been utterly useless.
The basic premise is that data is covered by the voluntary Safe Harbour agreement when it is stored for the specific purpose that it was registered for. For example a US company registers with Safe Harbour for the storage of EU personal data for the support of their product "ABC". Should this US company release another software package "DEFG" then the storage of EU personal data for support for this software package is not covered unless they specifically have another Safe Harbour registration for this as well. A US company stating that they have registered with a voluntary Safe Harbour agreement means nothing without examining the details.
While this seems reasonable given that the US company should only be storing EU personal data for the stated purpose, the reality is that most companies will forget that the data is to be used for a single specified purpose and merrily use it for other purposes or forget to register another Safe Harbour agreement. As a result, the chance of EU personal data actually being covered by a voluntary Safe Harbour agreement is pretty slim.
To compound the problem, while this data is in hands of a US organisation, any US body with the legal authority to do so may request and must be given full access to this data. Once the EU personal data is in the hands of such a body the Safe Harbour agreement does not apply and this data may be used and disseminated at will. Again, this doesn't seem unreasonable until you understand that the scope of organisations able to demand this data is extremely wide and not just limited to law enforcement agencies, i.e. it covers every municipal and county service imaginable.
Even after all of this - what happens if a US company violates the voluntary Safe Harbour agreement for the storage of EU personal data? Absolutely nothing, that's what. There is no legal recourse as it's a voluntary agreement rather than a statutory requirement.
A couple of years ago I had a long chat with a professor who knew considerably more about dinosaurs than I ever will (not especially hard) and he stated that he believed that there was no evidence for dinosaurs being cold blooded and the belief that they were cold blooded was more likely a cultural "they must have been primitive as they were such a long time ago" attitude than anything based on fact. He specifically pointed to birds and asked the question "when did they become warm blooded"? He also doubted that a such broad genus(?) could have been been so successful if it was made up of large land based cold blooded animals as in the current world the only incidences of successful "large" cold blooded land animals are in niche environments.
Similar-ish: We had in a PC on a site where every hard disk started to fail randomly losing or corrupting data until they wouldn't boot. We replaced the system a couple of times, the second time we had a two week long burn in PC that suffered no problems at all until it went onto site...
Turned out that the PC was leaning against a pillar that contained the conduit in which ran the multi-phase power for the entire complex. We moved the PC 2m away and never had the same problem again.
Yeah, open to the public. How strange, having had a "readers ticket" (or whatever they were called) it was quite an odd, arcane place to visit and a world apart from your average municiptal library in just the sheer scale, feel and atmosphere in the place.
Ah the Turf Tavern... mmm... one place that's a possible candidate for being responsible for a chunk of my student grant being "missing". Also a great place to take visiting tall people! My favourite incident (I may have an evil streak) was a 7'1" friend attempting to order at the bar and having to lean over sideways at near 90 degrees but then he had to all but crawl through the doorway and there was no way he could stand in the main bar anyway even if the ceiling there was a few inches taller than the door.
Subscriptions grew more than 51 per cent year-on-year to $829m, while licences sold in the classic way fell 21 per cent to $275.3m and services and support edged up to $113.3m from $108.8m.
Well duh. Adobe stopped selling anything new except through their pepetual revenue generation scheme (aka. the scheme that's bad for any consumer capable of basic maths). It shows the strength of their lockin in the marketplace that they've managed to force so many users into the perpetual revenue model.
Splendid. Took me a minute to figure out what was going on there as dynamically generated / self modifying code algorithms are never particularly easy to read. This is particularly true when you're used to procedural code and know the pain of working professionally with dynamically generated code (e.g. often found in JavaScript) all too well.
On an aside, why do so many new language designers manage to make their syntax only barely more legible than INTERCAL? (and never as polite)
Well that was quite hard to read. But I suppose there is a point there.
On the other hand if people can't take challenges and questioning of their beliefs without resorting to violence, persecution, prohibition or derogation (is this a word?) of others then they have a serious problem.
A suitable XKCD would be appropriate however I can't think of one offhand therefore here's "How to suck at your religion" instead.
True. The digital processing of films for quite some time was done at 3k or so. The excuse given was usually that it was a higher resolution than the human eye could perceive (at any distance) however this always ignored the inconvenient fact that humans tend for focus their eyes on parts of a scene rather than the entire scene as a whole and therefore more than 3k would be required. For example I can easily distinguish and see pixels on the 2k monitor I am using at this moment even though it is taking up a less than half of the width of my vision (it does depend on the colours though).
Sky have the unfortunate but inevitable problem that they have restricted total bandwidth and increasing the available effective bandwith is a case of improved compression techniques or sticking yet another satellite up in orbit and having the receivers handle this. AIUI there is still (or was some) available capability on the receivers themselves which is very sensible and forward thinking of them but this still requires one or more satellites to be deployed to use it.
I have a lot of sympathy for the poor bastards at Sky (and VM and other similar digital providers) who have to manage the total bandwidth available and counter this against the guaranteed rates that some channels contractually require along with the negotiations for enhanced bandwidth bursts for premium events which force other channels into lower bandwidths during these events (try watching the less premium channels when a big sporting even is shown, for example). Some channels have minimum bandwidths with capacity up to a certain amount, some a fixed rate regardless, some with a desired rate but with contractually agreed drops to lower if necessary... basically every which way they can be agreed upon.
When the shift to adding HD channels came in this must have thrown even more complications into this mess with "standard" definition channels all being reduced in quality to allow the bandwidth for the "high" definition channels. The upshot of this was great for marketing drones because it accentuated the improvement given by HD channels... by reducing the quality of SD channels.
It's no wonder than your average digital channel has somewhat less quality than the previous analogue equivalent.
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