Posts by John Smith 19 16330 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
Yay for them as well.
Of course the other thing that that govt was known for was cancelling the TSR2 in favor of a "UK only" F 111 (which never in fact turned up). That was more down to Dennis Healy however.
Bit like that "UK only" version of the F35 that the US has been promising.
But Benn did have actual principles.
Which puts him several kilometres ahead of most current politicians.
He would also be about the only PPE graduate who seems to have been worth a damm.
I would raise a glass to him.
Limiting customization, sorting out the work flow properly, picking the software before the servers or the OS etc.
As others have noted dumping the various data schemas of each system (if it's even possible for some of them), merging them and weeding out the (inevitable) junk data before they populate the master (Oracle) system are all good moves.
But it's still a huge task and a lot could go wrong.
I'll wish him luck, as I'm sure they will need it.
"A better way to state the point would be that a random citizen is far more likely to suffer damage from a criminal than from misuse of information gathered by foreign intelligence agencies. "
No.
My comment was that a) The control of identity theft and/or child pornography is nothing to do with the signals intelligence agencies and b) the real threat of an actual terrorist incident is grossly disproportionate to the effort made in spying the citizens of their own country.
In 2007 MI5 stated they had 2000 islamist terror terror suspects. That's 0.0032% of the UK population who might perhaps maybe possibly commit a terrorist act.
I'll try to say it one more time. A US or UK citizen has every chance to be spied on by their own spy agencies for no reason, some chance of being a victim of a for-profit crime and almost no chance of being a victim of a terrorist act,
Yet those agencies are (supposedly) focused on the leastliekly event.
It's a simple idea, yet you appear to have trouble understanding it and try to re phrase it what seems more palatable to you.
Why is that?
"I do have a worry but its more around criminals working on the internet, taking peoples bank details, distributing child porn etc. We make the internet difficult to monitor and those people become much harder to catch and them and terrorist types are the ones we need to catch. A more locked internet makes it harder. Just open it all up."
You equate a real loss of privacy with a potential improvement in the crime rate.
This has nothing to do with real threats and everything to do with the creating and maintaining of a state of fear which justifies this rubbish.
BTW neither the control of child porn or computer fraud are in fact part of the remit of intelligence agencies. Their supposed remit is the control of terrorism and intelligence gathering by foreign nations.
It is the former that "requires" they spy on everyone forever.
If you don't know this the basis on which you're making decisions is completely inaccurate.
"They could choose to not be a US registered company, if what the NSA asked them for was so abhorrent -"
True.
They could also use some of their enormous profits to lobby to have THE PATRIOT Act scrapped.
After all as US corporations are "people" shouldn't they fight for their country as well?
But you're right. They chose not to do that either.
""....Hello Mattie...." Guess again. Unlike you sheeple, I don't sock-puppet or use multiple accounts to try and not feel lonely."
Well that's good to know. I'll take your word for it.
Personally I view sock puppeting as a public service.
It gives us so many more opportunities to downvote people.
"I agree. And so do, to the best of my knowledge, all defense intelligence organizations. There have been calls recently that the GCHQ should use its surveillance to catch pedophiles; I oppose this because it isn't their job, and using military capabilities against citizens sets a bad precedent. Of course, soon standard law enforcement will have capabilities similar to those of the military organizations -- and then what?"
In a word. No.
The NSA has supplied information to the DEA about drug deals and DEA agents have lied about the source of that information.
You seem to have a problem with the idea that people oppose the idea of dragnet surveillance because a)It fosters a view that "Everyone's guilty." Or as the GRU used to put it in Stalin's time "We never make mistakes." b)It's grossly disproportionate. c)It's not my problem as they've never come for me.
The point is you don't have to do anything to have a file constructed about you on-the-fly by these organizations for what is effectively no reason.
I guess your so used to having no privacy in whatever job you do or have done that you've forgotten that normal people might get a bit p**sed off about that.
I suspect you won't "get it" until someone actually waves a full file in your face and shows you exactly how much data can be be collected on a nobody.
Processing and storage have become so cheap that and data sources available to these TLA's so plentiful that should you become someone your history can simply be checked through to find any useful "biographical leverage" as John Brunner euphemistically put it.
This has nothing to do with proportionate targeted surveillance against an actual individual or organized group.
It appears to have rather more to do with various government con-tractors and con-sultants (or maybe we should just call then conslutants) whose first answer to the question "Can you identify all X threats world wide" will always be "yes."
"As long as you are honest for SC clearance you'll have no issues. Honesty is the key, it's why I don't care what information I send over the internet is snooped. If you smoked a joint as a kid and are honest about it you'll sail through SC clearance. Heck one day you may even run the country."
I see..
So yo don't have to fear you're loss of privacy.
Because you already gave it away for your job.
And for the rest of us?
"Except those companies do have one thing they can do - they do not have to have physical nor corporate presence in the US. If google were *so* upset about it, after the first order came in they could have announced that they were upping sticks and moving everything outside of NSA's explicit reach."
You forget that THE PATRIOT Act puts any US registered company in the NSA's pocket.
That law is the core that drives the bending of the FISA courts and a bunch of other stuff.
It could have been repealed.
It has not.
"Risk is part of life and it is certainly part of business. Vain attempts to minimize risk at the expense of freedom are pointless. Our own governments and their allies are far greater threats to the average person and business than the Russia/China boogeyman."
Or as Mary Shaefer put it "Insisting on perfect safety is for people without the balls to live in the real world"
The present system gives the worst of both worlds.
No actual security and very little actual privacy.
HTML. Markup languages were in use within IBM to allow them to keep their huge volume of documentation up to date. IE The 1960's. Their use is briefly alluded to in The Mythical Man Month by Brookes. SGML (the parent to all modern standardized markup languages) was lead authored by Goldfarb of IBM. AFAIK these could be rendered on dumb terminals attached to S/360 mainframes.
Hyperlinks. IIRC Sir Tim was inspired by a Mac app from a company called "OWL" based in Wales. but I'm not sure anyone had the notion to generalize the link into something (potentially) linking across the whole web.
Rendering application. Or "browser." Well that idea has been around for since at least Smalltalk.
BTW the original VAX browser ran on the mainframe and wrote to (effectively) a frame buffer in main memory. It then invoked a (tricky) routine to compute the differences between it and the previous image to minimize the amount of bandwidth needed and speed up the rendering.
This is an old text editors trick.
TBL scores because he was in a place which needed vendor neutral systems (sure IBM, DEC or Sperry or Univac could probably sell you a terminal that would thrash a 1st generation web browser, at $50k/ desk :-( ) and he was smart enough to make it happen.
None of it was new, putting it together in a form that could be delivered right down to a dumb(ish) terminal was.
TCP/IP stack + HTML interpreter + rendering engine --> Browser.
Simple when it's laid out, is it not?
But that was then, this is now.
So let me set a little puzzle for the rest of you.
Take the bits of modern software infrastructure you're most familiar with and put them together (perhaps with some little tweaks) in a brand new way that 10s (100s?) of millions of people will use daily to solve a problem they did not realize they had.
"If I understand it correctly, the issue here is that the modem software has a relatively high-level interface to the phone's file system. That's different to a peripheral sitting on the same bus as the CPU."
No.
The issue is the RF MODEM software is not a separate process running on the standard ARM but a separate processor implementing the Android interface by executing software on it's own processor.
And with a whole bunch of extra commands as well.
Does Microsoft keep a list of all the file formats it repeatedly has trouble with.
So when they do a complete-from-the-bare-metal-absolutely-no-code-cut-and-pasted-nosiree-not-a-line rewrite you have a list of stuff-to-not-screw-up-this-time.
One defense I've heard over the years is that MS has to patch it's drivers because the hardware suppliers versions are so p**s poor. It could be argued that at some level this format has to be actually rendered by some sort of display device and this is tricky.
But then it's always been tricky, back since the days of Windows 1.0.
Simple to understand.
Can handle non boolean variables.
Turning complete (if you include a flag for 1st cycle and termination conditions that read it).
Can be optimized.
Supported directly in COBOL 85 (and requested to be included so yes it it used).
Used to implement knowledge based if/then/else systems with a 100x speedup.
And unknown to probably 90% of the people reading this.
"It almost makes it seem like she really believed the stuff she said before, that all this spying etc, is carefully regulated and totally for the good of the people. Otherwise, how can she be surprised that they would illegally spy on her too?"
Which for a multi term Senator simply beggers belief.
Only dementia could give such a level of weak mindedness.
"Now you know what the rest of us feel like. Can you hear me now? You and President Obama have trampled on the constitution until it is no longer legible. You did not want to complain about the behaviour of the Federal government and its sundry agencies untily your ox got gored. So, cry me a river! See if it will make any difference. Yes, your rights have been violated. Just imagine that you are being made safer by YOUR government. It should make you sleep like a frikkin lamb."
I'd say do not feed but in case you actually believe this BS I'd point out that the THE PATRIOT Act comes from GH Bush Jnr's time in office.
Your current president didn't start it but his response to put these data fetishists on a leash has been ineffective.
So it's an electrolysis then combustion thingy?
It's true that combustion does not scale well. In rocketry there is the "Characteristic length" L* which is chamber length over throat area.This used to suggest that micro rocket engines were impossible (it's usually quoted in inches, often over a foot).
But L* is a simple way to capture very complex thermochemistry between the gases and the walls and in fact at just above the stochiometric limited combustion in very small chambers is possible.
Quite what you'll use it for is another matter. ....
" We have turned off (and disabled) all the twittering apps, the tracking apps, the "please tell Google exactly what I'm doing, where, every minute of every day" apps, the apps which tell you when your Facebooking friends(*) upload a new photograph of themselves sitting on the train and the other data-allowance-wasting apps(+).
So these apps are not constantly calling home, or using the GPS, or sucking data from next-door's WiFi, and so the radios (for there are many in a modern phone) can sit idle for most of the time. On top of that the 4-core processor can power down and slow down most of the time, just keeping enough going to listen for genuine communications from real people - i.e. telephone calls and text messages."
Damm right.
But what about the yoof and their constant need to know who/what/why/where/when how all their real and fapbook friends are every millisecond?
(No personally I don't give a f**k either, but htey are quite big buyers of this stuff).
When people write up embedded Linux and "1 second boot" systems the #1 common power drain seems to be the backlight on the screen. Figures of 5W seem to be quite common.
Despite this AFAIK no mfg lets you turn it completely off.
Of course doing so would mean phone mfgs would recognize that frankly no one gives a s**t about their UI until they need to make/receive a phone call.
Because otherwise you'd have light coming from a surface about 1/1000 of a wavelength wide.
Which would would be impressive.
BTW it's emissions band is also voltage tuneable which could enable a whole bunch of other applications, as well as possible laser architectures.
But of course this is v 0.1 tech.
Cautious thumbs up.
"I remember that one - Byte sure had nice cover art back in those days. "
True.
"But programming anything at all complicated in Forth messed up your head even more than HP RPN calculators!"
Kind of true. My impression was that Forth offered phenomenally good use of scarce memory and processor cycles but once you reconfigured your brain to "Forth mode" it was very difficult to get back to more conventional languages. Shades of LISP.
That said all of Rockwell Collins hardware runs (or ran) on a proprietary in house designed stack processor and I'd guess Forthers would also be quite comfortable with the Transputer.
Forth. It's not a language, it's a lifestyle.
I'd suggest.
But if you must...
Well isn't the point of the article that ""still on target for at least 2 Degrees Centigrade " depends on a) The seed values on the Bayesian analysis and b)fudge factors for poorly understood aerosol and cloud physics and chemistry.
IOW in your model, with your seed values and your parameter settings that may be true.
My instinct is you'd be looking at an A4 page folded longways to get a decent sized keyboard for a touch typist that's compact, light enough to not have consciously decide to carry it, and available.
You'll want 1 second boot because who wants to f**k about when the muse ceases them? I go the impression that EPOC's "publish and subscribe" model was a big contributor to battery life. I wonder how well Linux holds up.
I'd suggest multiple ports of micro SD storage. But all radio standards are power hungry. Maybe 1 or 2 USB ports for phones, printer if they can be completely powered down when not in use.
While I doubt anyone's going to watch video on this I think sound is important so microphone, headphones and speakers are in (albeit very small ones). Standard 3.5mm connectors only.
I also think TrueCrypt or similar should be the default for all media, but I'm not sure how to reconcile it's boot speed with a slow authentication process.
But here's the trickiest of all.
Run on 4 AA batteries for 40 hours or 2 AAs for 8 hours. Note that with a system that sleeps a lot between key strokes and runs audio through its SoC audo processors buffer memory that 8 hours straight could be days if not weeks.
If you're really the sort of person who might go anywhere in the world you can't be hampered by some super duper but unobtainable battery design which Murphy's law states will quit on you exactly when you need it most.
"I know nothing about the Farnsworth Fusor. But Farnsworth Image Dissector camera was inherently doomed. Farnsworth invented "a" TV system. but like Baird's it wasn't actually original nor part of modern TV development (starting 1926 and EMI & RCA success in 1935). Farnsworth's and Baird's was a dead end. Though ironically DLP is mechanical TV, albeit using nanotechnology. The RCA and EMI electron gin cameras and today's chip cameras work due to charge storage per frame rather than only sensing light level at scanning instant (Farnsworth's Electronic Image Dissector and Baird's disc then mirrors) thus about 10,000 more sensitive for SDTV and over 30,000 times more for HDTV."
2 things.
Farnsworth was deep in litigation with RCA (or The Radio Trust as some newspapers of the time called them) and his case looked quite strong before IIRC he went out of a hotel window.
The Image Dissector Tube was the sensor used on the space shuttle to image low brightness stars to update it's attitude and position in space.
"That is a quote without full context. The article says that Buddi opted out of the contract after the MoJ changed the specifications, so it seems safe to assume that the context of the quote is that the MoJ wanted something substantially different from what Buddi thought they had signed up to provide. That happens with government bodies and large organisations. A lot."
And because they are a real company, and not a govt con-tractor they thought "Stuff this for a game of soldiers" and walked away from it.
My suspicion is some civil servant has gotten a nice fat brown envelope to a)Get them to develop the software so they can then "license" it to his paymaster for a peppercorn license or b)P**s Buddie off so much they walk away and their paymaster gets a shot at the contract
BTW can I suspect that "£300m contract" is IRL £30m/year over a decade."
Govt procurement. Just nothing like it.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
