Posts by Pete 2

What the fork?

The problem with banning specific words is that there are so many near homophones that would be impractical to ban. Until anyone in power comes up with the ability to ban context rather than content schemes like this will always be flawed.

Of course, when people realise that there are many, many acceptable words and phrases ("taking the mick", being a fine example) in everyday use that have exactly the same meaning as "nastier" equivalents and that by using the sanitised versions they are committing the very offences they are so outraged about - just with different words, what will they do then? Somehow I doubt they will recognise their own hypocrisy: they'll probably just make it illegal to point out how inconsistent all these rules are.

Not their job

> Police are powerless to stop ... criminals from hacking

Although the way the police work, it's rare for them to jump in during the commission of a crime and stop it. Historically, the police have always been a force that acts after a crime: both to catch the baddies (if possible) but mostly to act as a deterrent to prevent further crimes being committed. More recently they have acted as both advice-givers to help citizens enable themselves to not become victims of crime and most recently they have been used as a salve to reduce the fear of crime - rather than crimes themselves (although recent figures suggest that crime rates are at their lowest for 30 year, for what that's worth) so it looks like something's happened.

For more "modern" crimes against companies, organisations like the Serious Fraud Office have been set up - although their success rate is amazingly low, the cost of their prosecutions is amazingly high and the time it all takes is amazingly long. It appears that we need an SFO for cyber-crime, but preferably one that is actually able to be effective: both in catching the baddies and deterring the noobies.

Although before any crime-fighters can start to take action, we need a decent set of laws and some judicial precedents setting out what is OK and what is actually a little bit naughty.

Just another thing to hang off the back of my telly

> sends is just a command that tells Chromecast to grab the content stream and render it itself, via a custom receiver application that's loaded and run on the Chromecast dongle.

So basically you use your PC, lappy, tablet or phone to find something you want to view or listen to. You then use an app on that device to send a link to the Chromecast dongle saying "here, suck on this teat". CC then tickles the source and starts to pull the stream with no further interaction from you or your "big" device.

Okaaaay, so the CC dongle is still basically just a dongle. The cleverness is in the two apps and the commercial power of Google who can persuade media companies to develop CC interfaces for their stuff.

So why can't I just have the Chromecast software on the Android TV dongle I bought last year? The app that sits on my tablet would be just the same and since there are already millions of TV dongles out there, the market has been established. It sounds like I already have all the hardware needed to implement this. The tablet/laptop app would be the same irrespective of the dongle used, so I just need a Chromecast for Android app to run on my existing dongle.

Sounds almost yawn-worthy.

A long way to go

> poking fun at the fact that a woman had created a male image.

Because men *never* create female images. Oh, wait ...

(maybe this means that all straight male porn, most advertising and pretty much every nude portrait has been completely misunderstood and is really just an ironic commentary?)

Never forget the personnel angle

> two sayings are worth keeping in mind:

There's a third. Restores are useless unless you have the staff available to apply them

All the talk about backups, restores, DR, high-availability focuses on the technical aspect and never seems to address the issue regarding people. There's little point having a full tested recovery plan, or backups that you *know* you [ well: someone ] will restore if needed, if that someone is either unavailable, indisposed, sacked or chooses not to do it (Yeah, go ahead: fire me. How will that get your system back up and running?)

Whether it's something as mundane as the staff canteen serving up a dodgy lunch that lays the whole IT staff low, a particularly good party that does the same but more pleasantly, a scheduling "hundred year wave" where all the players are simultaneously on holiday, off sick, on strike, on maternity leave and freshly redundant or any other unforeseen circumstance that means nobody answers the phone when the call goes out.

Possibly the worst of all is when no-one can remember the key to all the encrypted personal data that was backed up and can be successfully restored, but for one tiny detail.

So yes: make sure your tech is all fired up and ready to rock. But don't take for granted the person who has to make it all happen.

Emergency services?

And how many of those deaths (from whatever cause) would have been survivable in the city, where medical assistance would be on the spot very quickly?

In a lot of country areas (less-so in the UK due to the much higher population density) it would take an age for an ambulance to attend any of these accidents. That's if there was a way of alerting them of the incident in the first place. While it's unusual in the UK, a lot of the boonies in america have no mobile phone coverage and no passers-by to call it in.

For a moment I thought they were serious

until I got to the bit:

> new powers given to industry watchdog Ofcom, which will oversee the ISPs

I realise this is just the Daily Mail deciding that it knows better than a democratically elected government. And that it's easier for (call me) Dave to make some sort of announcement during the summer holidays to stop them wailing on about whatever they wail on about - and presumably to court their support in the next election (less than 22 short months to go - yippee!). But they must realise that any internet rules have the same effect as dropping a rock into a stream. The water will just go around. Drop in too many rocks and you don't stem the flow, you just flood the surroundings as the pressure of water, or adolescent males' urges shows no upper limit.

Summertime

BST

and the coding is sweaty

The boss is jumpin'

and the stress level's high

Your client's impatient

and the code is spaghetti

So please little process

don't you die

One of these mornings

You're gonna stop dumping

Then you'll spawn your sub-processes

and be ready to fly

But 'til that morning

I'll just keep on hacking

and maybe the deadline won't pass me by

[ with sincerest apologies to George Gershwin ]

Defn: Defence

The ability to do unto others what they are doing to you - just do it first.

This is no different from what American companies have been doing for their governments for decades. Reporting back on the work they are undertaking, the technology they are using (subject to tight restrictions for reasons of "National Security"), quantities, locations and which other countries have suppliers in the area.

Just standard american "Reds under the bed" paranoia. - and yes: just because you're paranoid ...

What took them so long?

> people want to be "productive at work, to be able to print and have a keyboard".

Sounds like they've just reinvented the laptop. If you want a keyboard, the absolute worst place to put it is on the screen - the small, expensive and in entirely the wrong place for typing - screen.

The whole tablet format is focussed on media consumption, not creating stuff. How I laugh when I see otherwise credible employees trying to type one-fingered on the screens of their trendy tablets, when the new kid with a PC (who is at the bottom of the pecking order, so doesn't warrant interesting work toys) can run rings round them in speed and accuracy.

Redacted

"It has been alleged that GCHQ circumvented UK law by using the NSA’s PRISM programme to access the content of private communications. From the evidence we have seen, we have concluded that this is unfounded."

And who provided the evidence that was seen? And what did the three monkeys: hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil & wait for the New Year's Honours politicians do to ensure that what they were given (by GCHQ: the same lot who were accused) was a full, complete and accurate account of the goings on?

We had to destroy the asteroid in order to explore it

> a “space penetrator” project, offered as a lower-cost alternative to sending rovers to our planetary neighbours

To mangle the already mis-quoted report from the Vietnam War. Firing a devastating projectile into an exploration target doesn't really work if the thing you wanted to learn about is either blown into little pieces, or so disrupted that what survives the "attack" is unrecognisable. Imagine the yay! behind: "We discovered new forms of life on Comet ZZ9 Plural Z-Alpha, but unfortunately we destroyed it in the process."

Though on reflection, I suppose this is exactly how nuclear research is done (with "colliders" 'n' all), so maybe there is a future in it after all.

Nice idea, shame about the rules

You can see the motivation for this: get companies patenting stuff in the UK or "Yurp" and rewarding them with a little less tax in recognition of the R&D they've done.

It's just a shame that the pen pushers who come up with these rules and incentives just don't have the brain power to see where these seemingly good ideas will end up. I expect it all sounds pleasant and altruistic over a nice cup of tea in the planning meeting, but HMRC (and others) need to get out a bit more and see that in the real world the attack-accountants (!) in major multinationals will just rip these efforts to shreds in an effort to squeeze the last conceivable milli-penny from the tax liabillity.

Short and sweet

It is now seeking views from elderly patients

> What do you think are the main barriers to data sharing between services to support patient care?

The main barrier is the NHS's inability to and indifference towards keeping that data confidential.

> Can you highlight any examples of where data sharing to support patient care is happening effectively?

I'm a patient. How the hell could I possibly know. My doctor can't even explain what's wrong with me.

The "special" relationship

is beginning to sound more like Stockholm syndrome

If it's good enough for the Germans

you'd hope it would be good enough for the british press. Sadly, they all seem to have reported it as variants of "s___storm" or "sh*tstorm" - as if their readers are too stupid to discover what was "beeped" out.

I now wait for its first occurence on Countdown. No doubt it'll cause a shitstorm when it appears on TV screens.

Precognition

> Bush said: "I put that program in place

Of course, the powers knew he would say that to CNN as they had already intercepted the emails and calls that set the interview up.

If it was done properly

Confession time: I only watched the first series. Before it started the concept seemed fresh and original. After the first series ended it was apparent it was simply a pantomime to be watched by people who thought Dallas was true to life how oil magnates lived.

If someone wanted to make T.A. real, what tasks would the performers have to participate in?

- Most original way to avoid attending a Health and Safety presentation. Performers have to come up with an excuse and then follow it through without getting caught, or found lying

- The "bladder" challenge. Performers are made to drink 6 cups of coffee (proper stuff, not decaff) and then attend a meeting. Last one to run for the loo is the winner (and no relieving yourself "in-situ").

- The screen-blank. Performers have to conceal their computer screens from the boss - whether they were just watching pr0n, updating FB or looking for a new job. The boss will sneak up on them from various directions and employing diversionary tactics. The performers must prevent the boss seeing what they are really up to.

- The day off. Similar to avoiding H&S. The performers have to come up with excuses for skyving off for a day. As in real life, anyone coming back from a sickie and sporting a suntan gets fired on the spot.

- Do unto others. The performers have to plant incriminating evidence of disloyalty or illegal activities on their bosses' PC. After all if you can't get your boss fired, how will you ever get promoted.

If you think these are all pretty boring, desk based activities when you want people running round like 6-year olds on espressos trying to sell tat to idiots, then welcome to the real world of office work.

Sauce for the goose

> bugging friends is unacceptable

Isn't that exactly what citizens keep telling their governments whenever a new, more intrusive, form of surveillance is announced.

Keeping it under control

> imagine how good I could be with something that does the job better

And when you find a way of measuring the "betterness" objectively, then you can start to have a conversation.

The problem with all these functions: Asset management, Disaster Recovery, Capacity Planning, Change control, Security .. pretty much everything that's covered by ITIL and all the other management methodologies is that it's impossible to say whether they are value for money.

The amount of process that is appropriate depends massively on the size of the organisation,the legal & regulatory requirements and the skills of the people involved (the lower the quality of people, the greater the amount of process needed). However, since process is inflexible and expensive: both in the number of people it takes to do it and the amount of time it adds to a project or a change, there is a good argument to keep it to the absolute minimum - however you determine what that is.

One thing she said is right: automate as much as possible.

Pull out the calculator

> just 0.13 cents per play

Sounds like a good way to make money.

When you work out the number of minutes in a year and reckon that the average tune lasts 3 minutes, you can squeeze over 175,000 plays into a year (more in a leap year). At $0.0013 per play that earns you $227/yr

And you can always start releasing shorter tunes to get more plays per year, when times get tight. I can foresee the equivalent of server rooms full of iToys continually piping music out into the void, while metering up small but significant royalties for each play.

Sure beats bitcoin mining.

It's not what you see that counts

> ever higher pixel counts, an approach that disregards how we actually see moving images

... it's what you can sell.

Let's face it, while some people sit close enough to their screens to make high definition worthwhile, most don't. Just like most people don't watch TV or media players in a perfectly darkened room, so specifications for contrast ratios are irrelevant. Likewise for pretty much any other specification-led consumer product: cars, hi fi, computers, cameras, phone and the list goes on.

The problem is that you can't say or show yer average consumer a "better" product and just have them see/hear/smell/taste/feel that it's better. If you're lucky they might just recognise that it's different, though since change is often unwelcome or even plain bad <cough>3D</cough>, that's a double edged sword.

No, it's far better to bamboozle them with figures - occasionally even relevant figures - of real or imagined origin to "prove" that your product is better than the other guy's/ Luckily scienec and technology education is so mind-numbingly bad that only a tiny fraction of the population has any chance of knowing what a specification means and almost nobody, anywhere, ever (though I did work for an electronics company a long time ago -one of the engineers took his stereo amp back to the shop after running bench tests with our mil-spec test gear) has any chance of validating those specifications.

Although tech-specs aren't the only way of persuading the public. While some credulous techies might be taken in by the babble that accompanies them - and is often promoted by magazines and articles in their reviews - most people just get hostile when confronted by pages of meaningless numbers. For them the solution is just to wrap up the goodies in an attractive enclosure - or failing that, a shiny cardboard box will do.

His own best customer

> I started the account, maybe because I wanted to fool people

Sounds like he was the one most fooled. Though if I thought I bore even the slightest resemblance to one of the world's most famous nutters leaders (KJU or this guy), I'd take whatever measures necessary to remedy the situation.

I've been watching that plumber for half an hour ...

... and he hasn't done a stroke of work.

The irony being, of course, that neither has the watcher.

You've got to wonder with a 5-day interview how many assessors it takes to keep an eye on the candidates and whether the amount of time these people spend on selecting just a single "winner" would be better spent on something else: like going on a course to identify high quality staff in a 5 minute chat.

> to assess candidates in more detail than is possible during a conventional interview

You also have to wonder what sort of critical position these people are being employed for. Surely with that amount of investment in the recruitment process and the costs involved they must be highly paid, highly visible staff who could make or break the company in the years to come? You wouldn't take that much time to just employ a support person, would you?

However, since the candidates are also assessing the company during this time, I would expect that all of those who had any level of experience would quickly see through the charade and correctly conclude that Telstra was over-bureaucratised, slow and lacking the ability to make decisions. They would therefore run screaming from the interviews and consider how lucky they were to have dodged that particular bullet.

It does sound more like a test of endurance (or desperation) than skill.

New sales tactic needed

Relying on selling PCs based solely on the idea "It's got a NEW version of windows, that's better because it's ..... new" just doesn't work. It turns out that all the functionality that customers want can be got from Windows 2000 or XP. Since then the "features" that have been added are generally just bug fixes, security fixes, support for new hardware and 64-bit architectures. Sure, each version has been given a nice new shiny GUI, but from a "what will it do?" perspective, it's still just Windows.

If the only strategy PC makers have for selling there wares is based on the Windows version number and consequent increments in application version numbers, then they've got nothing.

2038 and all that

While not a PDP11 issue, the longevity of computers is a concern - and not just for people who want to flog us replacements. At this rate (maybe even exacerbated by the financial crisis) there could well be numbers of old, 32-bit Unix system running stuff when the 32-bit clock counter rolls over and we find ourselves back in the 1970's. With the popularity of small, cheap Linux embedded systems, some of these could be quite difficult to find - literally.

I just hope none of *them* are running nuclear plants