Posts by Martin Gregorie

Re: What goes up

At a guess a lot of the pressure toward using crypto currencies for electronic payments is coming from the US of A and their antediluvian banking system.

We simply don't need crypto currencies for payments here: within the UK we can use FastPay and CHAPS. Within the European SEPA area the IBAN uniquely identifies destinations at the personal account level and seems to be about as quick as FastPay in the UK. Australia and NZ have similar systems to FastPay and, IIRC, had them first. We also have the choice of using SWIFT or PayPal for quite a wide range of international transfers.

But in this area the US still seems to be the poor relation: where we can use CHAPS for the high value private transaction when we buy a car or a sailplane, the Americans still seem to rely on paper, with a bank Cashier's Cheque seemingly the medium of choice, but its SLOW - relies on snail mail to get it to the seller and then apparently weeks or longer for the cheque to clear and the money to find its way to the seller's bank. With the time all this takes its small wonder there are several fraudulent games that take advantage of the delays in the system.

I've asked Americans if they can't speed things up by using PayPal, but answer came there none, which is odd since, when I sold a radio to a US Gliding Club earlier this year, they suggested PayPal as the best payment option. We used it and "it just worked" (TM).

Apparently this is all a hang-over from the '30s depression and its aftermath, when the Feds came down heavily on US bankers, and split the banking system up so nothing was too big to fail, but boy did they make a mess: when I worked in NYC in the mid '70s I had to deal with the US banking system and it was horrible: my account was in a 5th Ave branch. I had to go there to get cash despite that bank having a branch where I was working on Long Island. Big contrast with the UK and NZ, where I don't remember EVER not being able to draw cash from any branch of a bank you had an account with.

Re: Smile, it's Tate & Lyle

@Dan 55

Same here. Several years back I sat in on one of the early privacy meetings which was chaired by DD, and came away with the impression that he was a fair-minded privacy advocate. But, of course he was in opposition at the time and has more recently turned out to hold pretty much the opposite views. Come to think of it, that is nearly identical to our beloved PM and her stated views on Brexit before the Referendum and her actions and speeches afterwards.

Is it fair to call them duplicitous? Yes, very much so.

Re: Hate to be "That guy" but...

I came here to say exactly the same. Have an upvote.

SWIFT HQ is in La Hulpe, just outside Brussels and AFAICR is owned by its member banks.

@Wolfclaw

When I started in the business (1968), we all wore ties and jackets to work. You could recognize the REAL old-time engineers amongst the tea-time rabble because they all wore bow ties. They'd been trained on card sorters, collators and other large, high speed mechanical kit. Wearing a normal tie was dangerous if you serviced those: bend over a running card sorter and if your tie dangled into it, you were instantly part of the machinery.

We know that Google have accurate dates for their satellite imagery because Google Earth can give you a list of dates to choose from. Since they have the information, it would be a good idea for their app and/or in-car nav system to show

"THIS VIEW IS 999 [DAYS|MONTHS|YEARS] OLD"

across its top edge when a punter switches to satellite view, just to make it blindingly obvious that the driver is not looking at real-time data.

Come to think of it, dating the maps would be a good idea too, though that doesn't need to be as prominently displayed.

Re: Yes, by all means, bring that cash home

Hold it! Hold it! Hold it!

I doubt it that US banks, however squeaky clean (or not...) could have brought us The Great Financial Collapse Of 2008 all by themselves. And they didn't.

RBS, LLoyds and Northern Rock all did what they could to help them out. They must have done a good job: just look at how their respective C-suites were rewarded.

And, while we're praising the great and the good, how about a small tip of the hat to Barclays and RBS for their sterling efforts to enhance the workings of LIBOR a little bit later.

Re: Prestwick??

As others have said, Prestwick is pretty well placed for lobbing stuff into high inclination or polar orbits, but its got 9000 ft and 6000 ft runways. This also makes it an excellent place for space plane operations, such as Virgin Galactic's White KnightTwo/SpaceShipTwo for starters, followed by proper workhorses with orbital capability like Reaction Engines' Skylon and Bristol Spaceplanes Ascender (assuming they're still in existence: last news update was in 2015).

By comparison Campbeltown and Newquay have just a single 8000ft runway. Stornoway has 6600ft and 3200ft. LLanbedr has 7000ft and 5000ft. Newquay and the Stornoway main runway both look to be rather crosswind for prevailing UK winds. IOW Campbeltown and Newquay have long enough runways even if they are rather crosswind but LLanbedr and Stornoway look rather short for serious spaceplane development: longer is better when you're trying to land something with not much wing and a correspondingly high touchdown speed.

Re: Kerbal Space Program

Not RUD at all, just plain LOOSE: Lack Of Orbital Speed Error

Re: We need more regulators!

...but will its bark be worse than its byte?

Re: CBI... Low productivty

...and don't forget the effect MBAs have on technology-based businesses: diminshed productivity due to their inability to understand the business or to avoid pissing off those who do.

Re: Playmobil

Jetexes are long gone. You can still find them on eBay, but since you can no longer get fuses or fuel pellets for them, they are collector's items.

The closest replacements are the Czech-made Rapier Rocket motors, which are just a range of small slow-burning model rocket motors that give similar thrust to Jetex motors and burn for a similar time.

Re: The results will be meaningless

Judging by a lead article in the latest New Scientist, what we really need is a swarm of robot sea-gliders to monitor ocean acidity and oxygen content globally rather than yet another atmosphere monitoring satellite: there are a lot of those already to say nothing of a variety of ground-based sampling stations.

The oceanic oxygen levels are far less known, except that they are dropping, and don't appear to be particularly well monitored at present. The effect of this on fish/algae/plankton, which is potentially very harmful, seems to be very little understood.

Re: The real world

Yeah, Pretty much agree.

Learned programming in Algol 60 on my University's Elliott 503 and used that language maybe twice after graduation. As the OP said, the fact that I'd learned the basic programming constructs was the important thing, since very shortly after that I joined ICL and was immediately taught PLAN assembler and, a year or two later, COBOL.

I've taught myself pretty much everything else I needed for a career in IT by using the "Read The Fine Manual and get on with it" method, alternating with "You've heard of it? Just the man we need: here's the manuals and you're on the project in a week". Along the way I've been everything from project sysadmin (several OSen), DBA, system test manager to system designer and lead developer using a variety of languages and hardware.

IOW, the prime skill that needs to be taught to all pupils in every school is HOW TO LEARN.

Second place goes to a reasonable grounding in the scientific method, basic mathematics and the ability to read and write concise, clear English.

Everything else is just fact cramming and should be unnecessary once a student knows how to learn.

But, of course teaching will never be reorganized along these lines because it would mean people might find out how to think for themselves, and we can't possibly have that!

Re: How Prevalent is Nude Photography....

It used to happen, but amateur nude photography was a minority hobby, at least among those without their own darkroom.

When I was a student, one year I had a summer vacation job in the Kodak (NZ) slide mounting room. Since it was illegal to send nude pics through the post, Kodak had to pull any boxes of slides containing them and forward the box to the snapper's local cop shop for collection.

This meant that those running the slide mounting machines were expected to spot any such photos and check them in a slide projector. Cue a yell of 'Got one!' and a general stampede in the direction of the projector and screen when anything was found.

However during that summer break (6 or 8 weeks - I forget which) I only remember that happening two or three times on my shift.

Re: The biggest UK hackers of the lot then?

While we're on the subject of election hackers, don't forget

Cambridge Analytica

I don't think they or their targeted messages have any place in national or local elections. Same goes for all other similar organizations. Their use by political parties should be banned and any candidates or parties found to have employed them should be removed from the election results. Retrospectively if needed, with an immediate bye-election to fill the now-vacant seat.

Re: Now is that "10 per cent better than humans" or "10 per cent better than American humans?"

You think London is bad? Try Los Angeles.

A lot of those traffic jams is directly due to Good Ole GM. Back in the '30s LA was building a Metro system - until GM bought it up and demolished it.

However, that doesn't affect the fact that the average USAian is a godawful driver by comparison with almost anywhere else in the world.

Re: iPlayer and the License

I don't give a flung fig for TV (don't have one in the house and watch a program via the interwebs about once every 2 or 3 years if that) but do value BBC radio output.

Consequently I'd be happy to have a radio-only subscription if that would guarantee support for:

- continued access to radio content on FM channels

- the now arbitrarily cancelled 7-day catch-up service that I used to be able to get via my Logitech Touch

- on-demand access to archived programs: "Old Harry's Game" comes to mind.

Since that would be at least as worthwhile as reading New Scientist (I have a subscription for that, provided on dead trees) I'd probably be willing to pay a similar subscription for the aforementioned BBC services, and certainly would be happy to cough up the equivalent of an online NS sub if there was one, i.e. the current NS sub less printing, packaging and postage costs

Re: We need to move past updates

A Web interface is needed because average consumer wants to control it from a smartphone but can't be arsed to login over SSH (or install SSH on the phone) and IOS maker doesn't want to pay for a complex control app or fpor programmers who could make that secure.

TR069 because simple interfaces (unless SSH) tend to be insecure and/or require the owning drongo to not only know there's an update available, but to trigger the update.

"No one in this world has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people." - H L Mencken

Re: Let's make planes that can't fly......

US planes were excellent Typhoon and Mustang, yes, great.

..and the Mustang was initially designed and built for the RAF to fulfill British requirements for a long-range fighter. At that time the Spitfire and Hurricane were short range metropolitan defence aircraft, which is what they'd been designed for, and once the Battle of Britain was over, the RAF needed something with a longer range that could take on the Luftwaffe over Europe.

The Mustang wasn't up to much with the original Allison engine, especially at altitude, but fitting a Merlin transformed it. Years ago I knew a member of the ground crew responsible for its initial trials in the UK, who described the Allison as a beautifully made car engine and who claimed that he was part of the team that replaced it with a Merlin during the initial trials.

The USAAF only got Mustangs later: remember that they thought that escort fighters weren't needed because B-17 formations had enough guns to deal with any fighters they might meet.

Have an upvote for your comment about call centres.

However, you missed a point about toilets: the lack of pipes is an issue but is trumped by a lack of water to flush said pipes. Much of India has bugger-all water outside the monsoons, when it has rather too much. So, solve the water retention and storage problem first, then consider whether a western water-profligate sewage system is appropriate in India. If not, work out how a minimal water sewage system might work, test it until it works reliably, promote the perfected technology and implement that.

Re: RE: "but where does the money come form"

So, if the makers of MRIs, PET scanners etc can't or wont upgrade them, put an airgap round said devices and the out of date stuff they talk to as an interim measure.

I know that purveyors of various medical devices have traditionally been, ahem, lax about system security. Others might prefer to call it "wilfully negligent" but I couldn't possibly comment. That said, more general publicity on this topic outside the medical and IT communities together with the odd sueball and much more attention to security on the part of purchasers should get their attention.

Yes, a good movie: it introduced me to Dali's paintings. My only disappointment with it was not showing the Mechanical Hound, but with hindsight any attempt to do so would probably have failed.

The master stroke was that there was no text at all in the film apart from numbers. Even the credits were spoken.

If you haven't seen the film or read the book recently, do so: its still relevant and becoming more so.

my masters won't be able to screw the end users as easily and I won't get my kickbacks.

--> FIFY

You beat me to it: it sounds like they've re-invented FLARM, but using wifi rather than the lower frequency unlicensed bands that FLARM uses.

Re: Hal Clement fans!

Nope! Haumea has almost no mass and little surface gravity while Mesklin is huge and the prime fictional example of a heavy planet.

Mesklin has 16 times the mass of Jupiter and a rotation time (day) of 17.75 minutes. The centrifugal force affected its apparent surface gravity, giving 3G at the equator (rim) and 275G at the poles. It is well flattened - 77,250 km diameter at the equator and just 31,770 km thick at the poles, so its diameter is around 2.5 times its thickness. Clement knew what he wanted for his novel: when he wrote it there was thought to be something like this in the 61 Cygni system.

Nobody every opened every single envelope to read and catalogue every bit of physical mail sent. Why should they have the right or ability to do that now?

Well-said, Sir! You've managed to summarize the entire argument in two simple sentences.

All lawmakers and government spooks should read and understand them.

They do not have the right to do more than they could do back when mail was sent on paper and a warrant was required for its interception. Since nobody has repealed laws requiring a warrant, interception without one should be penalized appropriately.

Re: Only have one thing to say to Lenovo....

Cool story bro. How does it relate to Lenovo factory installing Superfish advertising, allowing MITM modification of SSL traffic?

That's easy to bypass. Just wipe the disk clean and install Linux. Both problems (junkware and junkOS) fixed in one simple step.

I first did this to an IBM 560Z (Redhat Linux 7.2), and a few years later to the new Lenovo R61i that replaced it (Vista immediately wiped and replaced with Fedora). This is still running though on its second screen, keyboard and fan though the DVD drive died and so did its HDD, which got replaced by a Sandisk 128GB SSD - the R61i hardware can't handle disks bigger than 200GB but you can't buy HDDs that small now, hence the SDD.

However, for everyday use I now have a Lenovo T440 that also got wiped immediately and Fedora 25 XFCE installed.

Re: Hollywood being moribund

I still want to see a movie of Frank Herbert's "Dragon in the Sea", but it has to use the sort of 50's nuclear tech in the book and, preferably, be lowish budget and claustrophobic. Don't make it shiny and futuristic or it will disappoint.

Re: Why highlight meteorites?

Not necessarily. If the Earth was formed in its current orbit it would be fairly warm, possibly too warm to collect and retain water vapour from its surrounding space. Meanwhile, asteroids and meteors in elliptical orbits would be much colder and so more capable of retaining any water molecules they encountered.

Re: Get it right

Back in the days of VMS or George 3 we did not need updates every month.

Not entirely true. Back in the day I was a George 3 sysadmin (ICL's Wellington bureau, and British Steel's Battersea Labs). While its true that new G3 versions were issued quite slowly, I also remember getting patches by FAX every week or two, which got hand-punched onto cards and applied to the current G3 image via the GIN assembler's incremental compilation facility. Fortunately patches seldom amounted to more than 10-20 cards and each patch had a checksum, so mispunched cards would be spotted and not applied.

So, not that different to a RedHat Fedora or Raspbian Linux distribution then, bearing in mind that G3 could be run on a 32K 1903S with a single EDS60 plus a couple of tape drives for backups and offline filestore - thats roughly equivalent to 128KB RAM and a 60MB disk plus a couple of SD card readers.

Re: if FTP is insecure

...then SFTP should be fine.

In fact, since some of the graphical FTP clients offer it as an alternative to various flavours of FTP, HTTP, etc, its the obvious replacement. As a bonus, no extra software is needed on servers offering SSH support via the standard sshd server.

Its very unlikely that this would be allowed to land 'anywhere' thats not an airfield. Just for starters, there are no guards on the rotors, which look to be at just the right height to chop unwary adults off at the knee and decapitate dogs and small children.

Re: Mandator reading

It would probably make more sense to read Robert Heinlein's "The Moon Is A Hard Mistress", Asimov's "The Gods Themselves" or Niven's "The patchwork Girl" - all of these give believable scanarios for living permanently on the moon.

Re: a teaspoon ... would weigh 15 tons.

If you're trying to measure mass, use the right units: newtons.

Tons, whether American, British or metric, are measurements of the force exerted by gravitational attraction at the Earth's surface.

</pedant>

Re: Because

Yet more proof, if any was needed, that bean-counters kill basic research.

Re: Wasn't this already known?

Was it just fashionable or was the old logic thought to be wrong?

If the new would-be trend setters had even bothered to read old facts they'd have ignored them because, you know: OLD!

Re: Am I missing something?

Yes, you are. Making something that can reliably go to a programmed spot and crash or explode is relatively easy, though not cheap. Think cruise missiles, V-1s, etc. - none of them are cheap unless you have a full metal military budget to play with.

The only 'relatively cheap' small drone I'm aware of that can go some place, do something useful, come back and land would be the Aerosonde,

http://www.barnardmicrosystems.com/UAV/milestones/atlantic_crossing_1.html,

originally developed as a reusable meteorological drone that cost $10,000 or less. One flew the Atlantic in 1998, but its latest versions look as though they may be a bit bigger and pricier than the 1994 version. These were launched automatically from a car's roofrack and, although they could land automatically in a large flat field, were typically hand flown for landing if the landing area was small and/or had nearby trees etc. to dodge.

Then there was Maynard Hill's 'Spirit of Butts Farm', which weighed 5kg at launch and crossed the Atlantic in 40 hours in 2003, but it was hand-flown for launch and landing. I think he only lost four before one made it across from Newfoundland to Ireland:

http://www.barnardmicrosystems.com/UAV/milestones/atlantic_crossing_2.html

The problem is landing: launch and flight to a GPS target are fairly simple to automate, but anything that can land to deliver a parcel and then fly home again will need much better AI than anything yet invented if it is to reliably find a suitable place to land at or near its destination and do so regardless of weather or obstacles and without hitting anybody, their pets or moving vehicles.

And you still need some way of stopping light-fingered gentry from nicking the stuff it is delivering, or the entire drone for that matter.

Re: Lack of indicator lights and ports

This is also my only real complaint about a Lenovo laptop I bought earlier this year. Equally to the point, this isn't a recent problem: the machine is a T440, so this 'designer' idiocy has been a thing for at least three years.

Re: Is there any kind of valid comparison that has been done to other schemes?

Don't be silly. The British Government has a track record of never, ever looking to see what other countries have done before implementing a major change in the worst possible way. Examples of this are the introduction of decimal currency, metrication and the several failed attempts at introducing a national identifier.

Since the Estonian approach seems to be pretty much best of breed and that the New Zealand seems to work pretty well to is a cast-iron guarantee that the British Government will do something entirely different and/or stupid such as privatising it.

Re: Robots don't pay taxes...

So when there are no jobs and all the cash is funnelled to the top, who is going to have any money to pay for stuff and then where will the rich make their income?

Thats an easy question that was answered 280 years ago by Jonathon Swift. in his pamphlet "A modest Proposal". If you haven't read it, its here: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1080 and is quite a short and easy read.

Re: Florida Man

I looked at the graph and skimmed the text in your link, http://uhaweb.hartford.edu/BRBAKER/

Never mind the graph: the text proves the hypothesis: it is rambling, poorly organised and largely incoherent. Its author clearly has no idea of how to use a spell checker, or maybe that such a thing even exists. All in all, its a concrete illustration that the decline in average IQ is a real Thing.