Posts by Paul 25 181 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2009
After the fiasco with the BICEP2 team a couple of years ago it's nice to see a science project taking their time to make sure the data is right and the conclusions are sounds.
Fundamental science doesn't need hyperbolic announcements, it needs a measured and careful approach to announcing findings with lots of cross-checking, otherwise they end up looking stupid.
While NATS is not a perfect example, it's ownership model is interesting as an alternatuive to the NEtwork Rail approach of total government ownership.
While the government owns the golden share (so retains control and preventing a selloff), about 45% of NATS is (last I heard) owned by a group of the major airlines. Effectively its customers are also its owners.
Make OpenReach a company owned (at least to a large degree) by all the major ISPs, break the old link the BT once and for all, make its owners its customers, and OFCOM acting as arms reach regulator.
That way companies like Virgin and Sky along with the government can actually invest in the infrastructure directly in a way that they can't really at the moment.
I wondered about that too.
Different forces have different needs and requirements, the idea that one radio is necessarily right for all of them may not be right (I don't know if it is, but is seems possible).
Also, are the cheap radios actually good value? Perhaps the more expensive ones wer harder waring and less likely to break down and the plod in Yorkshire did a lifetime TCO calculation that meant spending more on the hardware was worth it over the long run.
I was flying back from a trekking holiday in California that day. We were all standing in the checkin queue reading the papers, which were all about how London had got the Olympics. We found out what had happened from an Aussie family behind us in the queue. I think we spent the rest of the time at the airport trying to get in contact with friends in London, but of course texts were taking forever to get through and I didn't get replies from most of them until we landed. One of them had a lucky escape by getting an earlier train than usual.
It felt like the opposite of 9/11, where we watched everything happen in horrific realtime. On 7/7 it was just bits and scraps of information trickling out. Thankfully all my friends were fine, although one would have probably been on one of the tube trains if he hadn't changed his routine that day. So very lucky.
I assume the idea is to use trajectories that combine the push outwards from the sun with gravitational slingshots from other planets. Although I am nowhere near good enough at maths to know how you might do something like that.
So kind of like combining the wind with currents on the ocean? (I'm not a sailor so that analogy might be bollocks)
Likewise, thanks for a very clear and concise explanation of something that the mainstream press have largely glossed over. I despair of the major media's inability to explain, even in general terms, what's going on with things like QE
I always like a good TW post. Even when I am in disagreement with Tim about some aspect of politics, I still get to learn something.
It's also nice to read stuff by someone who is happy to accept that you can disagree with someone without them been 100% wrong or having no insight worth listening to.
Sadly being a leftie in the UK at the moment can be hard work. Any suggestion that someone's sacred cow might be nonsense, or that some highly simplistic view of a complex problem might be wrong gets you shouted down.
It's all a bit too "People's Front of Judea" over here on the left at the moment :/
Massive poster of a woman wearing pretty much nothing, not much complaint (on the grounds of prudishness, sexisms another issue)
Show her nipples even partly, and prepare for mass outrage.
Man's nipples, not a problem. Women's nipples? Massive issue.
Our attitude to the human body is really, really weird.
And as others have pointed out, an erection is not something that's under conscious control, it isn't a muscle, as every man who's had a "morning glory" as a result of waking up with a full bladder can attest to.
Dropbox not turning up if you search for Cloud Storage is a bad example.
The Dropbox front page includes neither of the words "cloud" or "storage". Likewise OneDrive has no mention of the word cloud and only one of storage.
The fact that Google returns Dropbox at all if you search for "cloud storage" demonstrates how good it is at extrapolating what a site is about even if that site doesn't mention it at all.
I think the key is to know why you are tracking what you track. It's like performance tuning, you need to know what to measure and what to ignore.
If you are tracking it with a specific aim in mind then it can be very useful, but otherwise it just becomes background noise, and for the otherwise fit and healthy I definitely think it could be paranoia inducing.
I am losing weight, slowly, through simple calorie control and exercise. For that I constantly track my calories in and exercise, and measure my weight and body fat daily*, plotting a rolling average.
Each of the things I'm tracking is for a reason, either there's a target/limit to aim for (calories in/out) or it's a measure of progress (weight/fat %). I measure calories in because a lifetime in an overeating family screws with your sense of what a reasonable meal is, so you have to retrain your brain.
I used to wear a FitBit and use MyFitness Pal, but I found the passive nature of the data collection less useful than actively having to work it all out and record it myself. Because it required so little effort it didn't register as much consciously. Somehow having to work out the calories in a meal by hand and enter it myself seems to register more in my brain and is much more likely to make me stop eating.
Measurement is all well and good, but you have to know what you are measuring, what it means, and more importantly, what it doesn't. It's one of the reasons I plot a rolling average, it's the long term trend that matters, not the day to day weight.
* I know the number from a domestic body fat scale is dubious, but it's the change that's important)
I've pre-ordered EK, we've been playing a lot more board and card games recently and this looks like a bit of silly fun.
Unlike a lot of other kickstarter projects I expect the EK team to be able to deliver, it's a simple enough product being made by people who actually do this kind of thing for a living (I believe two are professional games designers) with help and advice from the Cards Against Humanity people. There are plenty of manufacturers who can make decks of cards and a box to put them in.
Far too many crowd funded products are complex electronic gadgets being made by people with a bright idea but who don't understand the problems of industrial design, manufacturing and scaling production.
Working in the web industry I see GDS frequently get held up as a paragon of how to "do it right", interesting to see the other side from time to time.
It's depressing that arrogance and hubris still seems to be the major issue in so many so called revolutions like this. So often, in complex domains, the new kids ignore the old guard and end up reaping the result, missing essential information and processes because of a focus on the wrong users. It's not just government, we've seen it time and again in the corporate world where some new management team comes in and shakes things up, thinking they know best.
It's a shame really as I think the original idea, to bring all this stuff together in one place, with one system, is still fundamentally sound, but GDS clearly got carried away and underestimated the complexity of the domain.
I quite like what I've seen of gov.uk, but I have pretty simple interactions with it, so it's easy to miss what's not there if you are not looking for it.
Only if there isn't something else you'd rather be doing with your time? Value isn't just (or even mostly) about money.
I enjoy making bread (all that kneading is very thereputic), but I value time spent with my five month old son far more than I would value that time making bread at the moment. Paying someone else to make a loaf of bread is excellent value for me, even if it's more than if I'd made it myself.
It's all tradeoffs. My wife enjoys making jam sometimes. But oddly enough she too values her time a little differently now we have a lot less of it free (in both senses).
Cor, you needed that rant didn't you? :)
I only experienced RM as a student, or helping out my mum's village primary, but even I knew they were crap.
I was pretty stunned to discover they were still around. I think the LEA lockins they did were a big part of it. I wonder if the switch to academies has has screwed them by freeing schools from that kind of thing?
In this case many of these businesses had orders fulfilled by Amazon, from their warehouses.
So the businesses didn't get the chance to sanity check the orders before Amazon automatically shipped them, at which point it's too late for the seller to cancel.
However my sympathy is pretty limited, if you put control of almost every aspect of your business in other people's hands, from pricing to fulfilment, you should be aware of the risks.
This reminds me of all those companies that had really good Groupon offers with no restrictions and found themselves swamped with orders for loss-making deals.
Likewise.
I'm somewhat older than you but I made the mistake of doing the A-Level computing course, total waste of time. I'd have been much better off taking double maths or english.
However blaming the teachers is a bit unfair*, successive governments have made the school curriculum ever more proscriptive, leaving little room for teachers to teach what they think is interesting. Of course that doesn't stop those same governments from blaming teachers for "failing to inspire" while trying to teach such an insipid syllabus.
I had some issues with my cable service recently. Both engineers who came out to sort it (both excellent), we quite surprised that not only was my super hub not the cause of my problems. but that I didn't have any issues at all with it.
Both said that the SH accounted for at least 50% of their callouts, normally due to its woeful WiFi performance in many older houses (which we have a lot of here in Bath). I seemed to be unusual in having a good signal.
They need to ditch and replace them all ASAP, it must be costing them a fortune in callouts and helpdesk time, and it ruining what is (at least for me) an otherwise excellent service.
And thanks for the nostalgia El Reg :)
I was 3 when the Speccy was released, and between that and a +2A (basically the +3 but with a tape deck), it laid the foundations for who I am today.
I think it's pretty hard to overstate the impact that it had on making me the person, and the developer I am today.
And I still think BASIC is underrated as a beginner's programming language. Nothing teaches you the benefits of structured programming, functions, packages, objects, sophisticated types etc, than not having any of those.
Having GOSUB as your most sophisticated programming feature really makes you appreciate modern languages :)
...so you can take it or leave it, but their average speeds are pretty much on a par with the advertised.
I'm on their 50mb package, and I get a pretty consistent rate very close to or spot on that.
I've never had 'jitteryness' but that may be down to which part of their network you are on. Generally when I have that sort of problem it's down to wi-fi problems. From what I understand the Telewest network is better than the NTL part, but that might be historical and no longer true.
I'm really looking forward to being bumped to 100mb. Although with a mostly wireless network I'm not sure how much use it will be to me.
It reminds me of the good old days of Telewest when they used to bump your speed every year or so, just because they could. We went from 1mb/s (this was a long while ago) to about 5mb in the space of a few years.
If two european companies that operate in the US want to merge the US competition authorities would be able to stop the deal just as the EU can do in this case.
If the companies don't want to be covered by european competition law then they can not operate in the EU, same goes for the US.
I'm not a grumpy old man, but I really enjoyed Casino Royale precisely because it didn't have too many of those Deus Ex Machina moments, where Bond escapes from something because he was given just the right gadget for the situation at the start of the film (although that bit with the defibrillator in the car was pretty dumb)
I hope that after the cluster-fuck that was Quantum of Solace they haven't decided to just revert to the old model rather than build on the hard edge of Casino Royale.
Of course, Q being a young bloke might signal that they are not simply going to make him the same old character, like they tried with Cleese. The worst thing they could do is try and make him some kind of young version of the original Q.
Fingers crossed.
I'm in Bath, which is in the old Telewest part of Virgin Media and I've never had anything other than excellent service from VM. But I know quite a few people in other parts of the country who've had woeful service over the years.
Telewest were fantastic, and from what I've heard NTL were bloody awful, so I wonder if the customer service organisations are still split?
I've also never had a problem with my Superhub, but I might have just got lucky with that (although I'd love one I can attach to the wall like the old modems).
However I do think their packages are starting to look increasingly uncompetitive. If/when we move, hopefully next year if the housing market starts moving again, we'll probably switch to BT Infinity which should be city wide by the end of the year.
I never thought I'd see the day when I was seriously considering moving back to BT.
"of the 732 Year 11 students identified by the software in February, 648 were currently in some kind of further education or job"
That isn't a good measure of how well the system works. If the system is getting a lot of false positives (i.e. marking kids at risk when they will do just fine on their own, then of course the stats will look good).
Surely the measure of success should be how many kids in the area, and of that age are classified as NEETs.
I'd also be interested to see what the stats are for those who refused to be part of the scheme, There's a risk that this is a self selecting group.
My understanding is that in the early days of nuclear thorium was the preferred route among many engineers and scientists as the reaction is inherently safe - it will shutdown unless you actively keep it going, unlike a uranium pile - and the fuel is more abundant than uranium and requires less processing.
However the uranium/plutonium cycle won the race for research funding as it was more suited to use on things like nuclear subs, and of course resulted in material suitable for use in weapons.
Thorium reactors are inherently safe (in the sense that you can't have a meltdown) and don't put nasty stuff in the hands of nasty people.
Of course I'm sure someone with more knowledge of these things will probably correct me on some of that IANANS.
There was also OS X 10.7.2. If you downloaded the slipstreamed recovery partition image as well, that came in at about a gig.
Also there was the new iTunes to support iCloud.
Then there was all the iCloud synching going on.
All-in-all I'm astonished Apple's systems coped as well as they did (which is to say quite badly, but it could have been a lot worse).
I was very glad I was on Virgin Cable.
Don't forget that he also co-wrote "The C Programming Language" which I still consider the gold standard in how to write a clear and yet concise book about a programming language.
Of course some of that is simply a reflection on the simplicity of C itself, but it was the first non-BASIC programming book I read and I have yet to read a more clearly written (and short) programming book that is not a "nutshell" style reference.
It's also a great demonstration of why nerds need to be good communicators.
For me personally this is a far more significant passing than Jobs, and I say that as an Apple user.
It's a shame that so few people (including in the industry) understand how much we owe to the old guard of early software pioneers, many of whom are still kicking around.
You've got to love Aussie politicians. I'm sure they are just as bad as everyone else's for being venal and corrupt lying bastards, but they do like to speak their minds.
We could do with at bit more of that straight talking here, rather than all the passive and indirect speech crap we get.
The comparison is between Singapore and Kenya.
Singapore is one of the counties in the world with the highest standards of living, with extremely low levels of corruption (according to Transparancy International) and very low levels of crime.
Kenya on the other hand, while significantly more developed than many in Africa is still nowhere near the same level of development. Just like many less developed nations, I'm sure Kenya is a prime recruiting ground for the kind of people who phish, hack and generally abuse the internet, just like poorer parts of south-east asia, and other african nations like Nigeria, home to the 419 scam.
I would be stunned if Singapore had the same level of fraudulent account activity coming from it as Kenya.
If it had been Cambodia, or China, instead of Singapore, then I'd think there was something amiss, but this seems perfectly reasonable.
He's trying to use Facebook in a way it clearly isn't designed for, by doing something they explicitly tell you not to.
If you are going to base your business around someone else's service, then you really need to learn to play by their rules. If you don't like it then find another line of business.
This is no different from your credit card company flagging a transaction from a company or country that is likely to be fraudulent based on reported rates of fraud.
If Facebook genuinely see more fraudulent access from Kenya than they do from Singapore then this would seem entirely sensible.
So long as Facebook's blocking is based on real numbers of reports, and not some person in an office making arbitrary decisions then this is not at all like racial profiling of people in airports on for arbitrary stop and search.
Do we have to do this every time the Reg publishes an article about pricing differences?
It's called VAT.
Google makes $20 = £12.30 at the moment/.
Add VAT onto that at 20% and you get £14.76.
So unless the VAT rate for digital services is different* this is actually a better deal than the yanks are getting.
* Possible, I find the HMRC website basically useless unless you already know where to look for something. However I did find a bit that specifies that VAT on digital services is charged at the rate of the customer's location in the EU, so basing the service in a low VAT location makes no difference. That assumes I understood the tax-man's explanation.
So Apple are making a whole 1p extra by "over charging" us (according to Google's currency conversion rate)
Oh the humanity!
These stories crop up with such regularity, concerning all sorts of companies not just Apple, that I'm pretty astonished that anyone would post an article like this without doing this very rudimentary bit of maths.
It makes you look really dumb.
@ray What has any of this got to do with cloud computing? This is an old school hosting company, not a cloud provider.
If you had a well designed cloud based setup you could quickly rebuild your infrastructure at another location or even on another provider.
I'd be impressed if even the FBI could confiscate enough of Amazons AWS infrastructure to cause them a serious problem.
I was in Switzerland last year and you could buy tickets online that you could either show on your smartphone or print out. It used a 2D barcode. Not sure if there were any special clients for it, you just got a PDF I think, but as I didn't have a smartphone at the time I went with the paper copy anyway.
It seemed to work exceptionally well.
If Musk can cheaply (relatively speaking) send capsules to mars and land them with a high level of accuracy it opens up the possibility of sending lots of supplies in advance of any manned landing.
If Musk can really get the cost down (and he seems to be managing it) any future Mars explorers would be far better equipped than the moon landers could have ever dreamed of being. You could send up enough stuff to keep them supplied for months. In fact you could keep supplying them on a regular basis. You could send the supplies using long but efficient routes well in advance of the meat-bags, who would follow on a more direct route using something like a VASIMR based craft.
You wouldn't want to send the entire journey to Mars in a Dragon capsule, and I doubt that's what Musk is planning. But it would be ideal for supplies and possibly as a lander once you get there,
She needs to be reported to the BMA for clearly not knowing anything about adrenalin.
Do they not teach things like that in medical school anymore?
"Getting excited increases pulse" shocker. I think that was on the first page of my A-level psych text-book.
She also doesn't appear to know how to conduct an experiment. Where's the control? If they had tested this against someone using a normal DS then that might have been vaguely scientific.
Even your average GCSE science student could design a better "experiment"
I only ever use credit cards for this sort of thing. If there are dodgy transactions, the worst that will happen is that they might max out my credit card, my bills and other payments go out just fine and my bank accounts remain un-touched.
Things may have improved, but last time I read about the rules credit card companies hold the liability for fraudulent transactions, whereas it is pretty much up to the bank as to how good they are to you in situations like this.
I've had a play with a friend's kindle and it's a lovely bit of kit.
The only thing that I found slightly annoying was that it seemed top heavy. It's not a massive issue, but I naturally hold it near the bottom so it was more effort to hold over a long period than if the weight had all been in the bottom.
Also, on the 3G front, if the RSS reader was able to read arbitrary feeds (rather than just the ones in the Amazon feed store) it would be really useful when travelling.
Combined with the access to wikipedia and travel sites, the free worldwide 3G makes the kindle a really interesting travel device.
" the last thing Apple would want is for every every Tom, Dick or Harry to be walking around clutching its fondle slabs"
Yeah, because they really fought to make sure every Tom, Dick and Harry didn't get an iPhone.
What universe are you in? I can barely move in this one without bumping into someone on their iPhone. I know that Apple supposedly go for the premium end of the market (and the iPad is way too premium for my pocket), but they don't seem averse to selling millions of the buggers.
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