* Posts by John Smith 19

16327 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009

SCREW YOU, Russia! NASA lobs $6.8bn at Boeing AND SpaceX to run space station taxis

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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Re: What a total rip-off!

"Unless Boeing performs better than SpaceX

I suspect SpaceX will perform better."

As do many others.

But until deliveries start nobody knows and the "Old Space" companies can still play the "(sniff) Well anyone can claim they can do it cheaper but that's because they don't understand the real costs of doing a proper job (like we do)"

So now we get to see if they are right and SpaceX can't deliver or if the they are just spouting the usual cost plus BS, Musk was right all along and in the next round of cargo and crew transport services contract both Boeing (crew) and Orbital (cargo) have to cut their prices or be turned into road kill.

Things are getting interesting.

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Re: ... the greatest nation on earth ....

"I was going to ask, by what metric are USA the greatest?"

Teenage pregnancy rates in the highest GDP countries in the world?

I'm pretty sure they score #1 in that table on a regular basis.

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Re: "if disaster strikes"

"I would think that disaster would entail something like being knocked out of standard orbit and having no thrusters. "

Not considered what would happen if there was a fire in the ISS?

"210 days is a bit much but may allow you, "

That is the length of time the vehicle can be docked to the ISS in standby mode.

If it all goes pear shaped the plan is to pile into the vehicle, undock and return to Earth.

BTW the big difference between what SpaceX is doing with Dragon now and this is that the cargo vehicle is berthed, need in active assistance from the ISS IE someone to operate the robot arm. "Docked" vehicles can separate from ISS under their own steam.

Credit card cutting flaw could have killed EVERY AD on Twitter

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Actually this is an error I'd quite like to see more of.

Doesn't hurt the user.

f**cks the company big time.

Of course if you haven't worked out by now that you are the product Twitter is selling to its' customers, the ad buyers, you're pretty dumb.

Blockbuster book lays out the first 20 years of the Smartphone Wars

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EPOC32 seemed very good.

Sybian.

Not so much.

I still think the idea of publish & subscribe modules is the way to lower power consumption but that's just me.

NHS grows a NoSQL backbone and rips out its Oracle Spine

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Re: So the £64Bn question.

"So you think they should have stuck to numerous incompatible local systems?"

Do you know why ARPA net (whose protocols the internet uses) was built?

To allow researchers to at remote sites to access incompatible machines without needing multiple terminal (apparently some really did work that way) on their desks.

And by incompatible I mean machines that could not even agree how many bits they have in a byte, or what alphabet to use.

IOW it's all about setting up data standards, mandating that different parts of the NHS use them and letting the individual parts (and the are very individual parts in the NHS) work out how to implement them.

So no I don't think p**sing away £15Bn to get systems to share data better was needed or good value for money.

"Prior to this they didn't even have a global NHS email system".

Great.

Just a single address book to hack and you can spam the whole NHS.

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Sot he £64Bn question.

Did this system produce more productive outcomes of the NHS as a whole than having no system at all?

Yes going to a very large open source system is a bold move by the NHS IT operation.

But was it needed in the first place?

John Smith 19 Gold badge

Re: The numbers don't add up

"There are some 36,000 GPs in the country, seeing an average of one patient every 12 minutes; making a total of 50 patients per second. That's an order of magnitude less than the number of messages per second that the system is processing. What are all these messages?"

You're assuming that GP's are the only users of this system.

How many pharmacies are there (that have a link into the system)?

How many hospitals?

TorrentLocker unpicked: Crypto coding shocker defeats extortionists

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No doubt the authors will issue an update shortly.

Or hopefully not.

Three photons can switch an optical beam at 500 GHz

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Awsome.

Just to put this in perspective.

Usual IR frequency used for fibre is equal to about 1eV.

so 3eV of control energy switch 1W or 1 J/s

3eV is about 5 x 10^-19 J

IE a signal 2 billion billion times bigger.

Which is quite impressive.

Smart meters in UK homes will only save folks a lousy £26 a year

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"Lets hope this is put a stop to it before they start putting them in."

Still possible IIRC. Write to your local MP now and tell them that flushing £10Bn of cash to the USA (where most of these meters are coming from IIRC) is a complete wast of money.

IIRC this is not an EU requirement. countries can say no if its not economically viable.

And frankly it's not.

This has nothing to do with lowering electricity bills (where do you think the £215/meter is coming from, a UK govt grant?) and everything to do with giving utility companies the ability to a)Change tariffs on the fly (naturally you wont' be able to switch suppliers as fast as they can jack their charges up) and

b) Remote kill switch for non paying customers/ customers who don't have an assured supply contract with them and the ongoing b**locks about deciding when and if new power stations (proper ones that can run 90+% of the time, not the 6-30% of windmills)

All delivered using the same kind of s**t that US cybersecurity researches have already found plenty of exploits in.

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"Well done The Public Accounts Committee for stating the bleeding obvious, shame you are 3 or 4 years too late. Not that it would make any difference because as I stated here nearly 3 years ago the reason we are getting smart meters is..."

No shame on the "Honorable Member" of the HoL for trousering a large stipend to get it included in the relevant "Green" legislation.

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Re: Smart meter vs dual-tariff (Off Peak) meter ?

"For comparison: in Victoria, Australia, where smart meters are now near-as-dammit universal, customers used to be charged about $25 to get a meter read when you move into a new house. Now the charge is about $5, which of course is still far more than it actually costs (approximately nothing, with a smart meter), but unarguably better for the consumer, and less error-prone."

Or you could just send your meter readings over the internet?

It's funny how utility companies "estimated" bills always end up being higher.

Forget silly privacy worries - help biometrics firms make MILLIONS

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Give us your biometrics. We won't abuse them.

Promise.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Gimp

"Nothing to do with socialism and everything to do with fascism."

Actually nothing to do with either

Data fetishists want data.

They will attach themselves to whatever government is gullible enough to believe the satisfying of their fetish will cure whatever "problem" they have.

In reality the satisfying of the fetish is what matters to them.

Moto 360 wristputer batt boob, elderly internals revealed in teardown

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1st class work from iFixit

Not so first class work from Motorola?

NBN Co says Melton test not valid, likely uses processes developed there anyway

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"Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain"

The Great Oz has spoken.

Indeed if it's so unrepresentative of the country as a whole why choose it in the first place?

And does this mean the overall bill might be knocked down a bit?

Whopping 10TB disks spin out of HGST – plus 3.2TB flash slabs

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Re: Shingles is a nasty painful disease

"partially overlapping racks to cram more tracks on a disk "

You'll never get them in a box that small.

China is now 99.8% sure you're you, thanks to world's-best facial recognition wares

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Big Brother

"help from the University of Illinois"

Is that legal under US law?

And that figure is impressive (I though facial recog got about 50% right in US casinos, which was why the FBI dumped it's facial recog project after decades).

So 99.8% accurate.

Only 100 000 people being mis identifed then.

Not to worry. A little trip to the Miistry of Love will show they are guilty of something.

China building SUPERSONIC SUBMARINE that travels in a BUBBLE

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Re: Can I just say....

"Standby to launch SkyDiver!"

Strictly speaking...

Launch Sting Missiles.

Who knew?

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Re: Why use the military?

"They can just sit back and watch USA destroy itself financially. Much easier than getting that messy red stuff all over you!"

Destroy itself?

Who do you think owns most of the US governments debt, and thereby picks up the US's bills?

The only reason the US can go on running around playing "Team America" is because Beijing holds their IOU's.

Something the US collective simply can't cope with thinking about.

EOS, Lockheed to track space junk from Oz

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Stuff that. What about getting *rid* of this space crap?

Which would be the best long term approach.

Brit Sci-Fi author Alastair Reynolds says MS Word 'drives me to distraction'

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Re: It isn't called "Word" for nothing

""Word" is a program to enter words. You'd call it "Sentence" if it was good at creating sentences, and "Novel" if you wanted it to help you write novels."

Neat.

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Re: @BongoJoe: Word isn't the best tool for job

"That rather suggests that you think there is some other software that is the best tool for the job. S"

Well Word Perfect was use to write the manuals for Boeing aircraft.

But Microsoft managed to kill them pretty well.

Stand clear! Will HTC's One act as a defibrillator for Windows Phone?

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So it runs Windows, but it's not really Windows?

Yes it looks nice and the underlying hardware may be quite impressive.

Accountants might well be satisfied that this is the biggest windows phone that people in Europe and North America have never heard of.

But I doubt that's an accolade Microsoft are keen on.

UK.gov sinks another £1.6m into Internet of Stuff spec HyperCat

John Smith 19 Gold badge
WTF?

So enabling *universal* plug-n-play of the IoT

Isn't the first order of business when securing a PC disable the UPNP functions?

I think it is.

CIOs: Want to hit your IT suppliers where it hurts?

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*Everyone* has to get something out of the relationship.

The customer. Systems that do what they need (it's the ability to do what they need that keeps their business in business) even it it's not what they wanted.

The supplier. They make an adequate profit to continue to deliver that level of service.

When customers are too clueless about what they need or either side decides to milk the other for maximum profit (or minimum cost) that's likely when the bovine faeces hit the air removal system.

e-Borders fiasco: Brits stung for £224m after US IT giant sues UK govt

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"So 97 million more to give a functioning system. "

Wrong.

That's Raytheon's estimate of what it would cost to fix.

And by a con-tractors estimate I mean what the con-tractor thinks the sucker customers will pay to make the pain go away.

In realty WTF knows what it would take to fix?

John Smith 19 Gold badge
FAIL

I'll be the cancellation looked great on the front page of the daily jailbait.

So the govt gave them *no* way to measure if it was doing what they wanted it to do.

then the next govt said it wasn't and cancelled it.

And let me guess. No penalty clauses either...

Of course this govt would never do what that govt did, right?

Like f**k.

Eat up Martha! Microsoft slings handwriting recog into OneNote on Android

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So even Redmond has to pay the Google tax.

Enjoying that not are they?

Intel's Raspberry Pi rival Galileo can now run Windows

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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Microsoft +Intel. The Micky & Mallory Knox of the IT business.

Can you say "dysfunctional co-dependent facilitators" ?

BTW I've never had to re-install a copy of Windows.

It sounds like a nightmare.

UK government accused of hiding TRUTH about Universal Credit fiasco

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But if the MPA published more frequently Ministers would have to explain their f**k ups more often

And they don't like that.

Boffins find hundreds of thousands of woefully insecure IoT devices

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"All your lightbulb are belong to us."

Exactly*

*Note I'm not advocating anyone do this, merely that if the IoT expands without security, privacy and access control built into the architecture of the products (and their controllers) this is simply inevitable given human greed.

It'll just be (to some) another money making opportunity.

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The IoT. All the s**t development practices of the real internet

baked into potentially life threatening hardware.

How could a fellow possibly resist signing up for such a delightful package?

And remember this is a small team with limited resources just trying to prove a point.

Think what happens when someone decides to do it for the money.

"Dear Siemens/Hotpoint/Zanussi unless the sum of 10 euros per machine is paid to us we will use the security flaws we have discovered in your appliances to destroy or disable them permanently.

A hacker collective."

Welcome to the future.

UK fuzz want PINCODES on ALL mobile phones

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Big Brother

Pheeeeew. For a moment there I thought

he wanted the pin code of every mobile phone in Britain.

Although I'd guess that would be the next step.

Detroit losing millions because it buys cheap batteries – report

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@JeffyPoooh

"PS. There's a company in eastern Canada that makes better e-parking meters. Rugged as all get out I hear."

That wouldn't have anything to do with Eastern Canadian winters being arse numbingly cold and the local municipalities getting a tad irate if their money collectors parking meters die on them?

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Re: Only a complete idiot...

"here is a chance that current Detroit meters were designed before AA batteries became very popular late in the Walkman era. Before that, 9V batteries were the most sold smaller cells and internal switching power supplies to up the voltage to the needed 5V were very inefficient."

You mean about pre 1985?

That was a long time ago.

Parking meter timer?

That's a Horovitz & Hill job if ever I saw one.

Oracle reveals 32-core, 10 BEEELLION-transistor SPARC M7

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A SPARC thread without Matt Bryant....

It's just, you know, unexpected.

Takes a bit of getting used to.

You'll find Yoda at the back of every IT conference

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Re: Sir

""Surely by having such a model you are just going to encourage people to employ a proxy in front of the firewall so it only ever sees a handful of IP addresses rather than a couple of hundred?"

All the directors in the room were suddenly all ears and the guy on the podium was looking daggers..lovely :) Mind you, I was never asked to go to another one."

Job done.

You mean Director don't come to these things to learn useful stuff to save their companies money?

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Terminator

Hmmm.

They cynicism is strong in this one.

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"Hairy Jedi snot."

Priceless.

Revealed ... GCHQ's incredible hacking tool to sweep net for vulnerabilities: Nmap

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Gimp

They are like f**king cockroaches.

And yes the injection of malware to another computer system is illegal under UK law unless you whisper the magik incantation "national security."

In which case it isn't.

It's time for PGP to die, says ... no, not the NSA – a US crypto prof

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Quick precis.

"I don't like PGP supporting email clients"--> PGP is rubbish --> PGP should be replaced.

I don't use it so I'm a layman in this argument.

Let me suggest that a lot of people use a web based email system even when they know they shouldn't.

They want to compose an email and the whole process of encryption/log on/select addressee/send email/log off is done for them.

Do that and a lot of people start using it because it's no longer so f**king clumsy.

And of course the resulting TLA and FLA budget requests will either bankrupt the respective governments or trigger the instant development of a useable quantum computer.

Or the governments concerned could realize that most of this surveillance is being driven by a combination of politician paranoia and data fetishist lust.

Why your mum was WRONG about whiffy tattooed people

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"you want fame, well fame costs and here's where you start paying for it, in sweat."

I know.

I'm going.

New voting rules leave innocent Brits at risk of SPAM TSUNAMI

John Smith 19 Gold badge
IT Angle

Time for a map of councils who can trusted and who can't?

Staying off open databases IE the types that are sold to marketing companies, is SOP if you want to reduce (but don't expect to totally avoid) avoid a torrent of useless s**t through your door.

Dummy phone numbers, addresses, emails and names are all good when requesting product literature.

Remember if you keep a track of which alias you used you can track which company sold your details to the A-hole on the phone.

Signed

Orinoco Womble.

Hackers' Paradise: The rise of soft options and the demise of hard choices

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"with a competent operating system, these machines were essentially bomb proof."

The author may not know if any system has an MMU but most of the readers here do.

And anything above the '286 should be able to muster a competent MMU to get the job done if the OS meets it half way.

The question is why does it not meet the hardware half way?

I'm describing the article as basic tutorial/nostalgia/rant.

Snowden leaks show that terrorists are JUST LIKE US

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So I guess the TLA will just have to rely on that 20 yr old hole in image compression software

It's tough to build a really minimal installation that does not have a load of extraneous stuff on it all of which offers potential entry points.

Marvell: NO WAY should we have to pay jumbo $1.54bn patent judgment

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"yet all declined, citing prior art. I"

I've always wondered if when one of these cases happens the "prior art" document is incorporated into the list of documents the USPTO should check the to see if this has been done before.

Doing this should widen the knowledgebase sufficiently to stop later attempts at patents from being accepted, filtering out rubbish.

Nahhhhh.

That would prevent the pack of scum bag lawyers involved from trousering the large green. they love so much and deprive the USPTO of income.

so probably not.

Snowden on NSA's MonsterMind TERROR: It may trigger cyberwar

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Well if you do wnat to orchestrate a DoS get the US Govt to organize it.

Obvious really.

NIST wants better SCADA security

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It's a start

But boy has it been a long time coming.