Posts by Martin Gregorie

..and for me too, but on this Friday.

Rats...

Rats are omnivorous and, like all rodents, they eat seeds and fruit. They reproduce like mad in suitable conditions. Given enough of them, they'll eat seeds fast enough to prevent the forest regrowth which would normally replace the trees felled by people to build houses and canoes or for firewood.

Re: China is horrid with property rights

Was there at least a payout? Probably nothing of value...

Well, the article did say that each family was getting the equivalent of $US1300 as compensation. The bit the story skipped was to find out what $US1300 would be worth to one of the families being 'evacuated' from the 5km exclusion zone.

That amount would be bugger all to us in comparison with the costs of moving to a new area and then finding replacement housing and a new job, but what would it be worth to a Chinese village farmer? How far would it go to get them set up in a similar house and with a similar plot of land and/or business premises? Could it provide the same standard of living they are used to? Since there was no mention of rehousing them some place else we can only assume that the kindly Chinese Government wasn't about to do that for the 'evacuees' and the $1300 bung is all they're going to get.

Re: Shakespeare? who is he anyway?

The plays are not incomprehensible - watch Baz Lurman's film "Shakespeares Romeo and Juliet" and tell me you don't understand it.

Better yet, go back into the archives and watch Zeffirelli's "The Taming Of The Shrew" or "Romeo and Juliet".

Re: Botnet armies generate clicks

Human viewers employ ad-blockers.

...because ads that jiggle, flash and obscure text are annoying and because of MSAA (Malware Served As Ads). Get rid of both and you might see fewer people running ad-blockers. Do nothing and the ad-blocker kill ratio will surely grow.

Re: detachable cabin system

Its also worth remembering that a cabin ejection is probably only survivable if it happens at altitude, and that that the majority of airliner disasters that weren't take-off or landing accidents have involved collisions, anti-aircraft missiles, cabin decompression or on-board bombs. In all these cases most of the pax would be dead before they hit the ground regardless of whether the cabin was ejected or not.

Re: Wheels

Yes, put the rotors up high, also use 5 arms, for greater stability and also for safety if a rotor fails.

Thats' already been done. See here:

http://ul-segelflug.de/f-a-e/519-volocopter-safest-airvehicle-in-the-world.html

Both have about a 20 min flight time on a full charge, but at least the Volocopter has a BRS[*] fitted for when it all goes horribly wrong together with rather more redundancy in its control systems and motor collection.

[*] BRS = Ballistic Recovery System. This is proven technology, as fitted to the Cirrus SR-22 among other aircraft. Push the red button and a rocket pulls a parachute out the top so you can float down - always provided you're high enough for the parachute to inflate before you hit the floor.

Re: Is it bad design

It looks from a quick scan of the proposed PG 9.5 manual changes that this is a reasonable approach given that the ETL crowd may find ON CONFLICT IGNORE clauses useful.

Using the proposed ON CONFLICT clause is, on the face of it, a good way to go because it looks as though not using the clause retains the current behavior, i.e. adding this SQL extension won't harm existing code and you don't have to use the ON CONFLICT clause if you don't want to.

Not using it suits my style because I tend to check whether a row with a unique key exists before attempting an insert rather than trying the insert anyway and handling the exception if the key already exists. This is probably due to over-long exposure to using 4GLs and COBOL to update ISAM files.

I understand exactly how you feel about IBM and share similar attitudes.

Nonetheless, their QA was impressive in the '90s. I did quite a bit of development on S/88 (a rebadged Stratus), S/38 and AS/400 back then. All the hardware 'just ran' and I don't recall tripping over any bugs in OS/400 or any of its utilities or compilers.

Re: Is source code necessary to validate correctness?

No, I don't think it is. What IS necessary is that the specifications for the voting software should be published and that they should be sufficiently detailed for a competent team to develop a comprehensive test suite from it that includes a set of test cases capable of exhaustively checking the conformance of the voting software to the published specification. All such test suites should be open sourced so that they can be independently verified should their results be challenged.

Electoral law should require that any voter can check the voting software by using a test suite developed from the voting software specification and that, should a independently verified test suite show the voting software is non-compliant with the published specification, the election will be declared invalid.

This approach allows the voting software to remain proprietary while still allowing it to be functionally verified against its public specification.

Re: Not all sciences are created equal

Maybe I should have qualified that with "highly reactive experimental chemistry is most fun to watch"?

- fixed it for you.

Euclid is not outdated, worthless knowledge

Mental Euclidian arithmetic is also rather useful for anybody who needs navigation skills: think pilots and many sailors. Calculating drift, or working out your heading from a map is purely Euclid in action. Think a modern pilot doesn't need these skills because GPS? How about emergencies caused by electric power failures or when a CME takes out the GPS, Glonass and Galileo constellations?

Re: I'll bet that ....

A license plate as sole ID is unlikely simply because many drones don't have the panel space needed to display an N number with even 25mm (1") high letters and on top of that it would be unreadable from any useful distance. That said, having the reg. written on the side of every drone is still useful as passive, on-ground ID if you're looking for a lost drone or if a cop thinks you've been a naughty boy.

I'd guess the more likely solution would be some form of low powered transponder or simply a device that broadcasts the reg. every 5 secs or so. Either should be cheap enough to mass produce because it only needs a range of at most 2-3 km (1-2 miles). Using one of the longer range IOT radio link modules would hold costs, weight and weight power use down. As a sweetener, it could double as a finder for downed or crashed drones.

Re: What is Altitude Angels aim in this?

Agreed: a useful service in theory, but in practice it will only be useful for the bigger and more powerful drones and is unlikely to have much impact on the casual, know-nothing drone user.

I worry about its apparent intent to use a 'radar feed' to handle deconfliction with manned aircraft. This gives me the impression that AA really don't know just how bad low-altitude radar coverage is even in the UK: so was I until I saw the Vulcan vanish from the trackers as it headed south from Rutland Water en route for North Weald the other Sunday. And low-altitude coverage is very poor over much of the US (UAT, which relies on it, is unlikely to work anywhere in the mountains or away from city airports without billions being spent on additional secondary radar installations).

Another worry is that they seem unaware of the FLARM receiver network. This makes gliders, which generally don't show up well on radar, trackable over much of the UK and quite a bit of Europe. FLARM has other uses too: because the transceivers are small, light, cheap and use little power (600mW), they are practical for use on microlites, balloons, hanggliders and parascenders, all of which are pretty much radar-transparent and generally don't carry transponders. As a result, these don't currently get tracked.

I don't think hacking or MIM issues need be a problem: end-to-end encryption will sort that out. In any case, unless AA use cellphones for realtime UAS contact, they'll end up either using satellite links or spending a fortune on relay stations simply to get round the same low-altitude coverage problem that caused the Vulcan to drop off the radar during its last tour.

Re: Writing surely is second

Yes: first agriculture, then writing.

However, science trumps mass production. Look at history: the Enlightenment and associated discovery of the scientific method was well established before the Industrial Revolution took off.

BUT, science would have been nearly impossible without numeracy and the associated branches of mathematics. Algebra and geometry were understood by the ancient Greeks, but numeracy requires the concepts or number and positional notation. The latter is very important: adding XVII to LXIV is bad enough, but very few Romans could have multiplied them and it would have taken a genius to do long division. In fact, even arithmetic never really took off until the Indians invented the concept of Zero and hence decimal positional notation. So, IMO, the first few Great Inventions were

1) Agriculture, 2) Writing, 3) Integers, 4) Positional number system, 5) Mathematics, 6) Science, 7) Engineering

Book keeping and commerce was able to be understood by many people once the positional number system made simple arithmetic easy. Science laid the foundations of engineering, which in turn supported building large ships and global commerce. These, along with accountancy, helped to set up overseas empires and then the Industrial Revolution. All this was up and running long before computers were invented, and they preceeded the relational database (and IDMS!) by 30 years.

Re: Shark Laser Razor

A Hammerhead Shark Laser Razor with nice blue headlights for eyes would do nicely.

Re: Let me be the first to say..

The one-eyed concentration on global warming by commentards, deniers and Lewis Page is starting to piss me off. There are other good reasons for doing something about increasing CO2 levels that are being ignored.

1) CO2 emissions are increasing the acidity of the oceans, which is definitely harmful to creatures with carbonate skeletons. This is known to be harmful to reefs and plankton, so will have an impact on food supplies, DMS emissions and (possibly) oxygen levels. Plankton make DMS and photosynthesize oxygen. DMS has a role in controlling cloud cover. As we're hell bent on deforestation (trees are good oxygen sources) we may need all the photosynthetic plankton we can get.

2) The Northern hemisphere jet stream is being disrupted by something: this seems to have a lot to do with the recent weather changes, droughts, etc. that afflict the northern hemisphere. What's causing this? For all I know it could be connected with oceanic heat content changes.

I'd like to see more attention paid to these two effects and how they are linked to fossil fuel use and a little less to the rate of change of global temperature.

Re: He's not making any sense

I agree that the user should be allowed to choose what to block: the problem is that this particular ad-blocker gives the user no choice other than using it or not using it. By contrast, all the ad-blockers I've used allow the user to choose which advert-sources they want to block, which is a much more nuanced approach.

I started adblocking for two reasons: (1) I hate animated ads and (2) many advertisers are cheapskates whose slow servers make page loading a right royal pain.

What I'd really like to see would be the additional ability to block any ads which are not static or contain links, i.e. plain HTML text, simple .JPG and .PNG images are OK, but GIF, flash, embedded Javascript or anything containing a link or using CSS gets blocked regardless of where it comes from.

Re: it is politics, not a shortage of water

@mondoman

What makes you think that damming the Hetch Hetchy valley and piping the water to SF didn't deprive the Central Valley around Modesto of water? As far as I can see the Tuolumne river used to deliver all the water from Hetch Hetchy to the Modesto area and thence straight into the Delta. I see that SF gets 15% of the Tuolumne's original flow. How does that compare with the reduced flow into the Delta that all the fuss is about?

FYI, I know CA quite well though am not so familiar with the way the terms NorCAL and SoCal are used. Nor do I know if there's any accepted term for the middle bit which includes at least part of Central Valley, or is that whole area simply known as Central California? I know the Central Valley fairly well from Tehachapi up to Williams, particularly the areas around Taft and Sacramento.

Re: Oddly enough, our man also says 60 meters rise --

El Reg's tame climate denier isn't saying anything new. Wake me up when he does.

The total sea level rise due to melting all the ice on Antarctica and Greenland has been known for a long time and so has its timing. This says that climate rise this century will be a few centimeters at most, simply because the thermal conductivity of ice is rather low. So, about all warmer winds and water round the icepack can do is melt the surface of the ice a bit faster without having much effect on the bulk temperature of the icepack. The resulting slow melt rate can cause only relatively slow sea level rise for the next century or two.

Quite. Labour needed to be rid of the last traces of the Teflon-clad, self-regarding NewLabour crew to have any chance of being electable. Now that shower have been given an unmistakable message it may become a credible opposition.

Re: Port blocking?

You don't need *any* ports open in your firewall or a static IP.

Use fetchmail or getmail (getmail is better because it doesn't have fetchmail's bugs) to retrieve your mail from your ISP's smartmail host via a POP3 link. No open ports needed in your firewall because getmail opens a connection to the smartmail host.

Your MTA (Postfix in my case) is set up to send outgoing mail via your ISP's smartmail host, so once again no open ports because your MTA opens the connection. Doing this avoids getting your mail blacklisted because it has come from a user's IP address: blacklisting user IPs is quite common, especially if they are dynamically assigned addresses.

The rest? My copy of getmail passes mail directly to Spamassassin. What comes back marked as spam gets quarantined and the rest is passed to Postfix for delivery via Dovecot.

I wrote my own mail archive, based on PostgreSQL. Feeding that is automatic: all incoming and outgoing mail goes through Postfix, which BCCs a copy to the archive. The archive is fast because its a database: it can find any message in 10 secs and optionally deliver it to my mailreader. That's certainly faster than I can ferret through a large mailbox regardless of whether its an IMAP store or not. Details at www.libelle-systems.com if you're interested.

Re: Coming soon

Its not Solaris, but it might could be Greg Benford's "Timescape" appearing 17 years late.

Re: Data protection

I received the letter telling me about it. In the data protection section it said something like 'we have no plans to share your information...at this time'. I opted out, but to do that I had to go to my local doctors surgery in person.

You need to do more than that: read the small print.

I did and, as a result, sent separate opt-out requests to my GP surgery and to the hospitals I've been treated in and so who hold (part of) my medical history. The hospital personnel understood exactly why I was contacting them and registered my opt-out without questioning it.

Everybody who cares about the privacy of their medical data, i.e. not letting it get into the hands of the insurance industry, needs to do the same.

I think its better than that...

...if I understand an unexplained feature of this printer - the scanner - I'm guessing you could use it to help print, say, a gearbox case with metal bearings embedded in its plastic walls. The scanner could be used to measure the bearings' external dimensions to allow for production tolerances so they would not be loose in the finished item. It could also avoid waste by checking the position and alignments of the bearings before starting to print.

Re: Government always needs a scapegoat.

Yes, but in this case Snowden was entirely the wrong target. The people who should not have been hired were the arse-covering managers who refused to listen when he tried to report security failings to them.

Dunno about Aaron Alexis: was USIS supposed to be screening for homicidal maniacs as well as doing security checks?

And, who should take the rap for outsourcing security to a private company? It sounds like such a stupid thing to do.

Re: This seems a very level-headed and straight forward discussion

I was a bit surprised that Linus didn't think that the OS could ever be truly hardened. Perhaps that is just a limitation akin to Godel's theorem?

What Linus said.

Bugs aside, it may be possible to formally prove that an OS can't be fully hardened unless the hardware fully implements hardware rings of protection as used by MULTICS and VME/B and that firmware, hypervisors, OS, and application code are partitioned to take full advantage of the security the rings of protection provide.

Yes, I'm aware that MULTICS and VME/B are ancient OSes and that,of the two, only VME/B is still maintained, that current Intel chips provide a reduced set of rings of protection (4 instead of the 8 used by MULTICS and VME/B) and that the likes of Windows 7 only uses two of them. They could do better: VME/B ran user code at level 7 with user data at level 8 so a program could not write to its code or be made to do so and could not access inner rings except via secure system calls. This level of code protection is totally unknown to Windows 7 (where the kernel runs at level zero and everything else is lumped together in level 2. Dunno Windows 8 & 10 do, but I'd hope the answer is 'better than that'. The same hope applies to Linux, BSD and the Apple OSen.

Can anybody point at current hardware with more rings of protection than Intel chips or at any OS that uses all the levels provided by its target hardware?

Isn't it about time any OS worthy of the name got hardened by making full use of the hardware's rings of protection. Just doing that would reduce the attack surface by quite a large amount.

Re: will it really help?

Oddly enough, yes, there are some governments and companies that can do a good job. Here's an example.

I'd been having a problem renewing a passport (no, not a UK one, but I'm not about to say who in case it embarrasses somebody who doesn't deserve that). The initial part of the online dialog was plain text (no problem there - nothing private involved at that stage), but Firefox 39 refused to start an encrypted connection for the next section (inputting details of the old passport), with the error page making it obvious that this was due to FF39 refusing to use an outdated cypher and the server insisting on it. I had a brief e-mail interchange with the sysadmins, who agreed this this was a problem that would be rectified. They also said that their change process couldn't do the update within my timescale and suggested a temporary workround which got the job done. Result.

Thanks, El Reg, for the article that highlighting the fact that the FF39 release forced the pace by deprecating the older and most broken SSL cyphers. I just didn't expect it to be so immediately useful.

This short (two e-mails each way) and very helpful exchange with the sysadmins in the passport office proves that some governmental departments are helpful and responsive, and will fix problems when brought to their attention.

I just wish I could say the same about HMG and the numptys running it. The latter don't have the brain to recognise that a clueless, tech-free bunch like GDS will never do anything except squander money.

Doesn't taste that good Bones.

It has to be better than that stuff most USAian restaurants sell as lettuce.

Re: Is it or isn't it?

Fonzi Scheme ? definitely not!

Ponzi Scheme? possibly.

Is there a number you can call to report them for booting/towing?

Probably not. All parking areas seem to be managed by the lowest bidding private firms these days. They don't have towing vehicles because employing somebody on a zero hours contract with a book of parking fine tickets is so much cheaper.

I think this also has a bearing on last year's Government cull of valid Blue Card holders. Every disabled Blue Card holder costs us money by getting free parking, dontcha know, so if we tell the Govt its costing them money the dozy sods will believe us and put a stop to it.

Re: Encryption and IT security

Why does that beggar belief?

Cameron, Millibrand and Obama are all identikit Blair clones: they all have very similar backgrounds and education, think the same way and do the same things for much the same reasons.

Re: How does it compare to human-only surgery?

Are robots better than humans for certain types of surgery? is the prime question that should have been asked and answered. The rest is nice-to-now but irrelevant by comparision.

IMO if the robots vs. humans surgical failure rate wasn't measured, then the source material is garbage and the El Reg article is scarely better because it apparently didn't address this point.

Re: Unless there is intent...

...but Amazon isn't a search engine in the general sense that Bing or Google is: it's just an in-store product finder that I'll consult to see if Amazon or one of their concession-holders stock the thing I'm looking for.

I'm with the judges on this: if I go to a shopping site and ask for a specific branded item I expect to be told whether they have it or not and the price if they have one. If I've asked for a Samsung Note 5 I do not want to be offered an MS Surface 3 or an iPad: I know what I want and all I need to know is 'We sell it, the price is £££££ and we've got 99 in stock' or 'Sorry, we don't sell that'.

Of course the situation is different if I've asked a generic question such as "Do you have 10 inch tablets"? In that case and only in that case I'm expecting to see a list of all the items that match the request.

Re: Oh great...

I dunno, single level storage, which is what you're talking about, works pretty well and has been around for a while. It first surfaced around 1970 as IBM's Future Series project, which was canned for marketing reasons, later surfacing in the 1979 as the System/38 and getting a refresh in 1988 as the AS/400 series. It currently lives on as the POWER 7+ series. The hardware has changed, but the operating system, OS/400 and the single level storage system that supports it are still there.

The storage basis for OS/400, which has remained fairly much unchanged since the AS/400 first appeared, is that all data and running processes share a single, flat address space which was originally mapped onto RAID5 disk arrays. The main processor of course has a chunk of RAM, but this is best thought of as a page store: there is virtually nothing in it that isn't a copy of a disk block or page (the two are synonymous) and files/databases are best thought of as memory structures that have been written to disk.

I'm not an IBM fan, but I have spend a fair time using S/38 and AS/400 kit. It worked well and was very reliable, so I'm here to tell you that single level storage is not a problem.

PS: the other well-known system that used single level storage was the Palm - remember them?