Posts by Conrad Longmore 454 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Apr 2008
The rules are quite clear - if your appearance changes in a major and permanent way then you need to get a new passport photo. So there's a good chance that gaining 31kg and nine years may make you look very different.
http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/TravelAndTransport/Passports/Applicationinformation/DG_174152
But.. I don't believe the problem is that Virgin owns (or owned) its own TV channels. Sky does that too, and it seems to be a reasonable thing for a broadcaster to own at least some of the content that they broadcast.
I think the problem itself lies in ownership of the transmission system - the actual underground cables, roadside boxes and backend switching. Virgin needs to divest itself of the actual physical network either to a spun-off company (National Transcommunications Ltd?) or sell it to an infrastructure company (National Grid, Arqiva, Hutchison Whampoa sping to mind) who actually specialise in this kind of thing. Sky don't bother owning the transmission system (they just rent capacity).. neither should Virgin.
What about PPC ads? Where an advertiser pays per click.. does this mean that some PPC ads are being "clicked" more than because of this crawler? It's clear that it could cause all sorts of mischief on other similar systems too.
It's not actually a hugely bad idea though.. if you could opt in to it, that is.
Step one:
Identify a bunch of areas that have significantly higher than average accident rates.
Step two:
Do anything at all. Sacrifice a chicken. Dance around in the nude. Put up speed cameras. Or do nothing.
Step three:
Wait a year, and overall accident rates at those locations will have dropped. Claim success.
What you do in step two is not that important, because you have chosen to concentrate on sites which are statistical outliers.. outliers that exist often because of some fluke or random event that does not happen again. There is a whole concept called "Regression to Mean" (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_to_mean).. in other words, statistical anomalies have a habit of going away by themselves and will just crop up elsewhere.
This is not to say that safety cameras are useless. In some places there really ARE dangers that can be mitigated by slowing traffic down. But often in these cases the real solution is something else.. if you have a dangerous junction, you can redesign it to eliminate the root cause of the problem (for example).
Big Brother because..
Flashforward five years:
Adobe announces their new Adobe Reader 12 package which they promise will finally fix longstanding flaws in the product. New Adobe CEO Kent Ertugrul said "We have added six new layers of security, plus internal support for several new programming languages including Pascal, Occam, COBOL, BCPL and PL/1. You can now run native PL/1 applications directly in your Acrobat documents, which I am sure people will find just as useful as the long-standing Javascript support we have. All this, and you can read PDF documents too! All you need is to download the 5GB application from adobe.com, and install it on a system that meets minimum requirements of a 64 bit OS, an 8 GHz processor and 16GB RAM. Oh yes, make sure that your anti-virus software is up to date because you will be needing it.."
Questionable? Not really. Councillors are well aware that certain material is confidential and should not be circulated.. it doesn't mean that they don't do it though, and often the release of this confidential information could be defended as being in the public interest.
Councillors are not exempt from RIPA, so if the council has an appropriate policy and procedures then a councillor's email can be intercepted without notice.
And it's not a political issue either, if the councillor was breaching confidentiality then it is a disciplinary one. There is a quite separate issue between Cllr Abrams and his local party.
But.. only someone really stupid would leak sensitive information using the council's email system anyway. However, a number of councillors are busted each year for looking at porn on their council laptops which is even more stupid.
It does seem to be all rather harsh on Cllr Abrams, but assuming that El Reg is 100% accurate in the facts then it is likely that the council has acted within its authority, internal Labour party squabbling is up to them.
Nokia knew that Symbian was a dead-end, which is why they finally promoted their skunkworks Maemo project to a phone. Symbian was never written with today's handsets in mind.. they are much better served with Unix-type derivative like Android, iOS, LiMo or Maemo.
But then Nokia killed Maemo too... the N900 is the first and last Maemo smartphone. MeeGo isn't really ready, Symbian is downshifting to cheaper devices and suddenly Nokia have no OS to run on high-end smartphones.
Perhaps Nokia should swallow its pride and flog an Android phone alongside their other handsets. Shucks, people might even buy Windows Phone 7 if it had a Nokia badge. But Nokia is one of the worst for "not invented here" syndrome..
What the hell is it with these zombie companies that keep coming back? There's SCO which has risen from the dead after an bodged headshot, Phorm which refuses to go down despite having all its limbs blasted off with a shotgun.. and now NTP which appears to have finished feasting on BRAAAAAAINS and is back for some more..
A bit harsh.. there are at least half a dozen people using the N900 (even though it is a nice bit of kit). I have nothing against Maemo (I was one of the first to own the old Nokia 770) but Nokia's might is not what it was. If they made the N900 run Android instead then I think that Nokia would be laughing all the way to the bank..
But.. the point for Samsung is that they were shipping out shedloads of phones with their own OS anyway in addition to all the Android, Symbian and Windows ones that they do.
I think that if you're shipping all those units anyway, opening up the OS and allowing third party developers seems like a no-brainer and pretty low risk approach.
Very nice, but I think that the HTC Desire is just a bit nicer to use than the current Milestone.. I suspect that this will be the case with with XT720 as well. I do note that Moto aren't saying what the processor speed is, so I guess it's still the 600 MHz one used in the MOTOROI and Milestone.
Good bloody riddance. Although current fragmented systems are not ideal, in most cases there is no problem with various health professionals getting information to other health professionals even if they have to fax handwritten notes across.
There are probably 101 ways of improving the system at a substantially lower price than the £200/head that this ridiculous system was going cost.
If it was IBM or HP sniffing around ARM, nobody would really care. But if seems to be a BFD that Apple are interested.. well, they're really just a technology company.
That having been said, it would be an expensive acquistion. Market capitalisation is about £3.3bn, but net income is just £40m. Anyone owning 100% of the shares would be spending £82.50 to earn £1 a year, which isn't great.
This is really the market that the Nokia C5 is aiming for.. a traditional "candy bar" smartphone running Symbian. It looks like a normal phone, has some run-of-the-mill features but it *can* do a lot more if you want it to. Surprisingly, the C5 finds itself up against very little competition..
Well, remember the Atlantic Conveyor? A merchantman converted to military use during the Falklands, it moved a small but significant aerial force of helicopters and Harriers into theatre which then went on to do some good. The downside.. it was extremely vulnerable to attack and was eventually sunk with the loss of 12 lives.
Your essay question is this: was it worth the risk of bringing an unarmed large merchantman into the Falklands theatre?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_Conveyor
WebOS is great.. but who needs it?
WebOS came at least a year too late to compete with the iPhone, but development took so long that Palm missed the opportunity of using Android instead.
So, now Palm have bet the barn on a proprietary OS that has launched into an exceptionally tough market where is has to compete against not only the iPhone and Android, but also a revamped Symbian, Samsung's new Bada platform, the upcoming MeeGo OS (the merged Maemo-Moblin platform), and then there's Windows Mobile, LiMo, ACCESS and more.
I'd love to see Palm survive, I really think that they won't. A shame if they vanish.
El Reg was here first:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/21/register_adserver_attack/
Sniping aside, there are a surprising number of bogus ad agencies out there. Increasing, people who buy and sell ad space are on the front line of security these days.. they just don't know it yet.
One thing bothers me about average speed cameras - is their evidence actually valid? After all, they are not actually catching you speeding, they are making an assumption that you are speeding given the presumed travel time between two points.
If you are on a straight road with no exits, then obviously you would have a hard time convincing a court that you weren't speeding. But in some places, speed cameras are used on far distance points on complicated road networks and they just ASSUME that you travelled from A to B on the most obvious route, which is not always the shortest. So, it is theoretically possible to be "caught" by average speed cameras when you have not actually been speeding at all!
I had the misfortune to see Indra in action in the election in Bedford in 2007.. it took forever due to numerous problems. Now, some of those problems were due to inexperience - for example, the quality of the ballot papers themselves was poor and this kept jamming the scanners.
One significant problem that I could see was that the Spanish OCR system kept thinking that a "1" (with a serif at the bottom) was actually a "2" and it was mis-counting the votes.
And one other significant problem is the lack of scrutiny - the ballot papers basically vanished into the machine and were never seen again.. the usual checks that you can do at a manual count didn't happen. Bedford did not repeat electrionic voting after 2007!
In this case the failure is with people who insist on using packer applications for their Javascript and are surprised when an AV application flags it up as being potentially malicious. There's no justification these days for using a packer - it's not as if you can't decode the things if you are really interested, and bandwidth these days will easily cope with unpacked Javascript.
Looking at the files it ate.. it seemed totally random. I don't think it was "targetting" anything in particular.
Serendipitously I happened to be in early in the morning at our place because we are migrating some of our clients off CA to a rival product, so I managed to catch it before it trashed everything.
@BobK - remember that you can exclude certain files and directories from your scanning, that's worth having a try if you have persistent problems.
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