Not today anyway.
Posts by Alan Brown
15045 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008
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Astro-boffinry world rocked to its very core: Shock as Andromeda found to be not much bigger than Milky Way
If this laptop is so portable, where's the keyboard, huh? HUH?
"My GP was the one who agitated for the health trust to use Linux"
My GP and I discuss the security aspects of smart card logins, the relative merits of various keyboard types and how cheap ones can make your hands hurt like hell due to the lack of cushioning at the end of keyboard travel (the relevance of this being that the NHS was supplying the cheapest possible keyboards for a while and staff were suffering joint problems)
We even arranged shootouts of a bunch of models so that people could feel the differences. It killed the "A keyboard is a keyboard is a keyboard" arguments. (No, you don't need to spend £200, but a £14 Cherry G80 keyboard is far more comfortable and has a longer service life than a £3 Logitech one.)
Former ICE top lawyer raided US govt database to steal aliens' identities
Re: @Doctor Syntax
"In the end he got one thing right and became an honest lawyer - by pleading guilty to his criminal behaviour."
This is the USA we're talking about. It was plea-bargained and negotiated _down_ to 7 counts of ID theft from whatever they could have reasonably stomped all over him with in court, plus whatever else they were threatening to throw and see what stuck.
Mobile phone dealer boss faces 12 years in director limbo
Microsoft's Windows 10 Workstation adds killer feature: No Candy Crush
Re: A thought.
"I'm guessing that only a few businesses running open source use 1,000-CPU desktops."
...Yet.
The size and power consumption of ARMs means that stuffing fifty to one hundred plus a suitable GPU in a SOC the size of an existing intel socket and a 70W TDP should make sense for most use cases.
Interestingly I'm seeing grumbles that ARM's licensing fees are too high. Perhaps MIPS time has come.
Re: Consumer refers to who's paying
" If you buy a computer from an OEM or retail and it has Windows installed then part of the price that you pay goes to Microsoft for the Windows licence."
Having just had to do this for a bunch of desktop machines (where we had the choice between Freedos or "some flavour of windows"), it's about £80 for Windows10 home and £87 for Windows10 pro. The retail price is about £110
It's slightly cheaper for laptops, presumably because they tend to have fewer cores.
Robot cars will kill London jobs – but only from 2030, say politicans
Re: Driverless cars.
8 seats is about optimum for an autonomous vehicle to act as scheduled and hailed transport. You're going to see a melding of "bus" and "taxi" functions.
Busses are only (barely) economic in peak periods and they do levels of damage to roads that's wildly disproportionate to their carrying capacity (road damage is proportional to the 5th power of axle pressure). The rest of the time they're a subsidy pit, so if you can have a fleet that breaks off into taxi mode outside of peaks and during peaks doesn't hit every stop because it doesn't need to (you'd need to have vehicles staged and ready to jump in/out of service but at the inner end of the journey that is taken care of by varying endpoints). For commuter-style services in peak periods where the busses run nearly empty they can entrain themselves out to the service edge in order to achieve best speed/throughput, breaking up at the points where a normal bus would start filling.
If you can make busses/taxis convenient then noone feels the "need" to have a car. I found that out living in a number of asian cities where taxis and minibuses were at most a couple of minutes apart.
Re: To Arms My Brothers
"Let us take hammers to these deceitful weaving machines"
The issue with luddites was that a rapid change resulted in massive unemployment.
This time around there's a shortage of drivers and to be honest the way it's rolling out means that they probably won't be replacing humans as fast as they retire.
"Driving" on a nice road is fun. "Driving" in city traffic is a tedious and stressful pain in the arse, exacerbated by selfish cunts who cut up everything in sight and trash smooth traffic flows. Such twats should be strung up by the toes from a streetlight on the second offence and by the nipples with fishhooks for the third.
Re: A lot of 'hot air'
"The only thing that TfL wants is to have ZERO privately owned cars on the road in Central London."
True, but they also want to extract their pound of flesh from those who ply for hire on that road.
T'aint gonna happen.
One thing worth noting is that despite the horrors of the Ringways plan execution(*) and the Central Box, the original (1950s!) plan was for everything inside Ring 1 to be car-free and as pedestrianised as possible.
(*) The real problem was cheaping out and not taking account of the effects on the neighbouring properties. They should have been buying up 100metres each side.. Outer rings (and the new south circular) were planned to be in trenches to keep noise levels down. If you ever wondered why the M25 is so bad, it's because it's carrying _all_ the traffic intended for Rings 2,3 and 4, plus more besides.
Stop calling, stop calling... ICO goes gaga after home improvement biz ignores warnings
From tomorrow, Google Chrome will block crud ads. Here's how it'll work
Re: re:The only way that we will see an ad-free internet
"I wasn't talking about an "ad-free" internet for everyone.
Just for me."
If you go to places like Thorpe park, you'll find that so many people are now paying to skip the queues that there's a substantial queue in the queue skipping queue, so they're offering a premium service to skip the queue skipping queue.
"I tolerate their presence if they are tolerable, much like I used to tolerate newspaper ads (don't read newspapers any more, but same principle)."
Interestingly, I found a Punch cartoon from around 1905 which showed complaints about advertising plastering every available surface were around even then.
Perhaps we had a Golden Age of reduced ads in the latter half of the 20th century.
Rogue IT admin goes off the rails, shuts down Canadian train switches
"Two working days later and they still hadn't disabled the account of a sysadmin. *rolleyes*"
As a sysadmin, I've sat down with management and ensured they disabled that all my accounts and access codes before I went out the door.
For the simple reason that if anything goes wrong later on, I do not want to be covered in any splattering shit. If they want to call me back in, then they can rehire me.
I've only had one employer who actually thought to change equipment administrative passwords. Most simply leave them alone for decades.
"over here you can be fired with several weeks notice, and can be expected to continue doing your job and set your house in order for a smooth transition"
The difference is that here, if you're being made redundant (vs "fired") you're going to be given a severance package and a reference which are both at risk if you do anything stupid.
If there's a hint that you won't play nice then your notice period will be spent at home, gardening, with all access codes having been changed before you were told about it.
The USA in particular has this peculiar concept of "at will" employment (which the tories keep trying to introduce here) which means that noone's job is secure from one day to the next - and one of the favourite manglement tactics when firing a lot of people is to parachute XYZ inept manager into the location with promises of long term upgrade to start sacking people ("hoorah", he thinks), and then push him out the door with no compensation when the dirty work is done.
UK Home Sec Amber Rudd unveils extremism blocking tool
Re: 99.995% is impossible
"As for the so called dangerous white tail spider, that one's a myth."
Whitetails are aggressive (most spiders try and run away, white tails attack) and whilst not particularly venomous seem to have pretty filthy fangs which lead to a high chance of infection when they bite.
A friend in New Zealand lost a finger (actually the entire metatarsal back to the wrist) after being bitten by one. Apparently it still aches 20 years later.
Yes, Assange, we'll still nick you for skipping bail, rules court
Re: What would happen if Assange stepped out ?
"but the charge would be skipping bail. This seems to carry a penalty of 3 to 12 months inside. "
Not for a first offence and certainly not for charges which no longer exist, especially as he's not been found guilty of anything. Causing the state to spend shedloads of money staking out the embassy isn't grounds for a harsher penalty.
Local habitual bail breachers get a £100 fine and told not to do it again.
If he got more than a suspended sentence or an afternoon in the cells he'd have grounds for an appeal.
Brit regulator pats self on back over nuisance call reduction: It's just 4 billion now!
Re: 60 calls a person
"My clever Fritz!Box router handles all my telephone calls. "
So does mine. The good part is that it has a seamless SIP facility that will link into various providers.
I have a 070 number with charge rate set to £1.50/minute that forwards to a SIP account that forwards to Fritz. For the most part if businesses insist on a contact number, that's the one they get.
If I get an unwanted marketing call coming in on that SIP account, its gets strung out as long as possible. I don't get any income from it, but I'm an evil bastard. The 070 providers laughed when I explained why I wanted it set to the maximum charge.
Military techie mangled minicomputer under nose of scary sergeant
Yorkshire cops have begun using on-the-spot fingerprint scanners
Re: The usual suspects complaining
> It's a question, are fingerprints infallible?
No
More specifically whilst they're believed to be unique this has never been fully tested and the number of loci used for generating a match doesn't scale to the number of fingerprints now being stored.
It was much easier when you only kept prints of the crims and were only matching against known baddies or direct suspects.
It's the same problem with "DNA matching" - the actual levels of match have been vastly exaggerated in courts and led to juries being misled. DNA and fingerprints are great for eliminating suspects but when it comes to generating matches you're in a different ballgame.
> Could you get arrested for a crime you didn't commit?
It's happened on a bunch of occasions
> How would you feel if it happened to you?
How would you feel?
Re: But does it actually save time?
"for the unlikely event that a copper (or someone else) might object to me taking a photo."
In my experience the "objector" is usually either a PCSO or someone caught doing something naughty.
They object even more vehemntly when being told they're actually being videoed and "I can, I have, I will continue to do so and you have no power to stop me" - once at which point the smirking policeman standing next to the now-fuming PCSO burst out laughing and said "He's absolutely right, now stop being a twat"
Re: But does it actually save time?
"There is no requirement to carry your driving licence with you."
No, but if you don't then you must produce it at a station within 7 days if asked to do so (and that's despite them being able to bring up a copy of it in the car to verify you are who you say you are)
It's usually easier to have it.
Re: But does it actually save time?
"A quick finger print check and ten minutes later, and the subject is issued with a summons for three offences"
The way the system is currently setup the fingerprint check will only tell that the person is not already in the system (ie: Known and wanted.)
About the best use for this is dealing with people who give false names/IDs when questioned at the roadside because they're wanted for other things (there are some locations/situations you must provide ID to the police - a wharf, when driving a car and a few others. For the rest you're legally allowed to decline to do so)
At best it's an elimination tool (which may be useful in any case). There are too many false positives to work the other way around.
I'm not entirely sure why this is a news story. These things have been in use by traffic police for over a decade. The bigger deal is how secured they are and what they're actually comparing, which isn't gone into at all.
Re: Not on IDENT1
" I can't tell how many stories i've hear of musicians getting their guitar back in splinters here in the US."
The applicable song is "United breaks Guitars"
And the response to that was to get "Untied.com" shut down for trademark infringement - Only in the USA (actually, only in canada)
"Fingerprints, or more correctly the methods and algorithms used to compare, are not that unique"
Exactly - and this has been known for some time.
Then there are people like my wife whose fingerprints simply do not register in scanners (She has them, but the ridges are so slight they don't get detected). This raises merry hell at immigration.
UK ICO, USCourts.gov... Thousands of websites hijacked by hidden crypto-mining code after popular plugin pwned
Re: No surprise
"If you create a system that is based on the premise of "swap processor time for currency" then there are going to be a lot of people who will try to find ways to grab time on other people's processors, for their own gain. "
This was one of the biggest worries of the camram-spam mailing list around 20 years ago - and in that case the currency (hashcash) was "merely" the ability to deliver email.
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