Posts by Peter2

Sorry, no fiver. :)

One time pads are a pretty obvious solution to getting virtually unbreakable encryption; coming up with a digital version of this isn't exactly rocket science. The only real question there is if he got the idea from hearing of an actual implementation of this, which wouldn't surprise me. It was my first thought, so i'd be surprised if there weren't hundreds of independent implementations of this from places like the CIA who wouldn't want a risk of somebody recording their satellite traffic and then decoding it, even 20 years down the line.

Picking a combination of some form of external input is also reasonably obvious; anybody going to this sort of paranoia induced extent is hardly going to rely upon a pseudo-random number generator as you'd assume the worst case that the RNG might have some kind of a deliberately inbuilt pattern to it that might compromise your encryption scheme.

Microwaving the CD's though as a destruction method is something i'm not sure about, i'd have thought that would just destroy the plastic and risk leaving the data layer alive, which could possibly be recovered by somebody sufficiently determined in a lab. I'd have thought a metal container, a can of lighter fluid and a match would have been safer. :)

To be fair, I have an office full of their low end wired gear (eg K100, M100 etc), which is very good value for money compared to any of the competition at a similar price point.

Most cheap stuff is pretty crap; with keyboards the legs break or keys die, mouse buttons/wheels break in normal use etc. With the Logitech stuff the biggest problem is that the lettering eventually wears off from many hundreds of thousands of keypresses.

Back in ye old days we had games that travelled around on floppy disc or CD/DVD. These were good, and aimed to be so much fun that you'd tell your mates about it and get them to buy a copy too, and be inclined to buy their next game.

Playing computer games didn't used to prevent you from socialising or playing outside; we built gocarts etc as well as gaming when I was younger.

Then came internet based games, and the subscription model. This was really more of the same, with the challenge being to get the player to want to keep buying the subscription each month.

Then comes the next business model, the "freemium" model. The people coming up with these things are literally employing psychologists to help them create games that are addictive to keep people playing them and then trying to separate more money from the person a month that they would spend buying a game back in ye old days. Things like lockboxes get added, which is simply unregulated gambling.

And this then extends into offline games; you buy the game at the full retail price and only get half of it and can only access the other half if you hand over more money, unlike ye olde days where you got the entire game for the purchase price, and then might get an expansion pack that included as much content as the original game for less than people currently pay for one bit of DLC.

So as problems that I can immediately see are basically:-

1) Addiction with online (primarily freemium) games which are designed to make themselves addictive to keep people paying as well as playing.

2) People playing online to absurd extents do not possess the basic level of social skills that were accepted as a norm 20 years ago and appear increasingly incapable of communicating, relating to or functioning in society.

3) All other forms of media break taboos to shock the audience and are having to get more and more extreme to shock people. People are getting increasingly desensitised and people argue that there is a correlation or causation with people then doing these things themselves.

So the CCP regulating the amount of time that people can spend online might make an impact on point one, but is probably more likely to just make these things go to a single player offline model. If coupled with further restrictions on playing offline it might have an effect on point 2, but as it stands the same people are probably just going to play offline games or watch TV/DVD's which isn't going to help, and it's unlikely to have any effect on point three.

It depends on the sort of orbit that you want.

Most usable orbits (eg geostationary etc) benefit from being launched as close to the equator as possible to obtain an instant speed of ~1kps from the earths rotation. Such satellites tend to orbit around the earth basically horizontally around the equator.

You can however go for a polar orbit where the satellite orbits vertically around the poles of the planet, which is about the only thing I can imagine launching from Scotland would be useful for.

Re: do people have a propensity to try to abuse AI systems?

Having a grid of microphones and recording where shots are heard is a perfectly legitimate use of technology.

But what I don't understand is that if somebody is shot in a car and there is a computer system that says "there was a gunshot here at the time" then... how in the name of all that is holy did this come to be seen as being cause to lock somebody up?

Re: Quick learner

The robot probably "worked" either 8 or 24 hours a day learning.

A human probably goes to a club once a week for an hour, of which roughly half of which is general socialising with people you haven't seen since last week, and half an hour is actual training.

Re: "A touchscreen, by itself, is not going to enhance anything"

In ye oldle fashioned lifts with buttons, you can still have hidden floors.

I was working with the landlord at one point and he had a key which inserted into the lock on the panel gave two additional options. Turn to the left and go to the basement, and turn right and go to the roof level with all the A/C units etc.

Re: Maybe Windows 3.1 was a sweet spot?

I'm still getting value out of X Tree gold, PSP8, Winamp and a few other bits of ancient software.

if old versions of software I own can still [can be made to] work then I see no reason to buy another bit of software to do the job. This sort of thing is of course on the way out; because there is little to no point upgrading software on the basis of required functionality companies have gone with forcing people into buying subscriptions so you perpetually hire software and never own it.

Re: In France, someone was convicted for nearly the same thing

That's France though, and an excellent example of why businesses from all over the world come to England to use our courts to settle disputes; they produce outcomes that make sense.

Re: Extinguishers...

IMO grid-scale storage is a dead-end anyway; it's only being pushed to try and paper over the problem of renewal intermittency.

Could we call it "solar and wind intermittency". If we rebuilt every waterwheel in the country and added new ones on wiers then the energy produced would only be intermittent on the occasions that the water in the rivers stopped flowing.

Precisely why everything was pinned on wind and solar i'll never know; other than it's cheap and favours large land owners.

Re: Smugglers

The thing is that as soon as something is made illegal the supply collapses, and the demand mostly doesn't.

Via the immutable laws of supply and demand the prices then leap. If your earning the minimum wage and somebody offers you ten years worth of your wages in exchange for smuggling a small packet with little risk of getting caught then many people tend to be willing to give it a go, especially if they don't think it's harmful. (ie; many people won't smuggle hard drugs but will cheerfully smuggle computer chips, prohibited books in workers paradises and the like.)

For most purposes it really doesn't matter how old the CPU's are. It's not as much of a bottleneck as people make out.

My previous (gaming) computer was one of the original "buggy" AMD Phenoms that would crash if you hit 100% utilisation on all cores and threads. I never noticed any problem with this, and it lasted 13 years in service before it got to the point that I decided it wasn't really capable of running modern games and retired it to a friends kids. It did get a new mid range graphics card every 4 years or so just to keep it competitive, but...

At work we had a bunch of core 2 duo boxes that due to tight finances were retained in service. I filled them full of memory, replaced the HDD with an SSD and gave them a quadro card for 2 screens and they lasted in service from something like 2008 through to Jan 2020 when Win7 support ended.

Due to not having enough laptops available for staff at the start of the pandemic in March 2020 these boxes which were still kicking around ended up being wiped and gifted to staff as thin clients so everybody had a decent home setup for working from home, and as only one of them has come back they are probably going to do another 5+ years service from now.

My point simply is that if a 12 year old CPU is still task adequate for general purpose use, there is no particular reason why a 5 year old one should be a problem. It's not like 2000 where we moved from a 25Mhz 386 to a 1Ghz processor in 5 years.

Re: But will they actually have to pay?

Amazon can appeal, but the levels of appeal are pretty limited.

Just saying, but Intel still haven't paid the file for paying the major distributors to not stock the AMD Phenoms from like 2007.

Re: @Peter2 -- Always trust Microsoft reports - not

I'd say bloody evil personally, but then I also think scammers deserve everything they get.

The funniest thing is that even if they hang up on you shortly after getting the card details chances are that they are still going to waste yet more time from several people trying to get payment out of the card afterwards. ;)

Re: Anyone remember Haynes Manuals?

A couple of decades ago people owned their cars and houses, which came with a drive, a garage and a garden big enough for a workshop. This enables space to store certain bits of kit to do basic work, such as axle stands etc.

Now people don't own their cars (which are on perpetual rent schemes like PCP's) so your not allowed to do that sort of work in the first place. Even if you were, the houses with a drive, garage and a large garden with a workshop are priced well out of the point that normal people can afford which prevents people from being able to do work on their own cars since most of the time doing jobs on the road is a bit dodgy.

Add to the fact that even if you do a job perfectly mechanically, the car will demand that it's plugged into a authorised garages computer to do things in software before it will work again, and you can see why DIY jobs are less popular these days.

Re: @AC

If you are law abiding then you won't have that many problems obtaining a firearm for a lawful purpose.

If you just "want a gun" though then yes, you shall no doubt find innumerable and impassible obstacles that keep firearms out of your hands.

Be honest; did you actually use FTP in a web browser?

Web browser clients only offered the ability to download; for uploading even windows explorer was a better solution than offered by any of the web browsers.

Which is a moot point, given that everybody used Filezilla for FTP sites because it was the best tool for the job.

The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house. I list below, with notes and examples, various of the tricks by means of which the work of prose-construction is habitually dodged.

From George Orwells's essay on English Language:-

https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/

Re: Is this the most sensible Gardner report ever?

*tricks*?!

Every web server on the face of the planet serves a different website depending on the domain name in the GET request as a core competence.

Re: Use early Microsoft formats where possible for interchange

Personally I hate when general senders email us their DOC or XLS file directly. Thanks to VBA et al, it is a giant security risk to open up anyone else's files (even though I have auto run turned off on my own desktop, of course).

You do know that you can force security options that the users can't change via group policy, right? You can force disable unsigned VB scripts, disable office downloading content from the internet etc.

Re: 'In the Public Interest'

A jury in the UK can reach any conclusion for any reason. It is known for a jury to declare that somebody who did commit the act was "not guilty" despite this being blatently the case. It's technicaly known as "Jury Equity" in the UK.

To avoid this whomever did it will be tried by a summary offence at the magistrates court instead of via a jury trial.

Re: Common Good?

The purpose for Facebook's point of view was obviously to come up with a form of neural linkage directly to a computer for a mobile phone to replace the voice interface.

Anybody passingly aware of the state of the art in Neurology knew and said in el reg's comments on this years ago that this was not remotely feasible; they are funding the neurology equivalents of the Wright flyer expecting that it was going to be a modern airliner.

Re: Seems a security risk

There was no fortune involved. Google the "Double Cross" system to read about what MI5 was up to during the war; by 1941 they had captured every single German spy in Britain with the exception of one, who had committed suicide.

Re: Put it to scale..

I worked in NHS IM&T a decade back. At that point, everything had switched to digital X-ray machines.

IIRC The downside of this was that the software for the multi million quid x-ray machine only ran on XP and the manufacturer had no plans to migrate the software off of it despite the extended support ending something like a year or two later.

Re: Why the obsession with MP?

Because a decent lens is largely a function of focal length, which is the physical distance between the camera lens and the image sensor. In cameras these are measured in CM; typically 5.6cm for short range work and 12.5cm-50cm for a telephoto lens.

Even a 5.6cm lens is obviously much thicker than the mobile phone, and a tele lens is getting on for the total length of the camera. This leaves mobile phone manufacturers with no alternative than to push crazy numbers of megapixels and then play with them digitally to try and generate a good photo because they don't have (and can't have) a decent lens.

To give them their due however, I was convinced that it would be impossible to get as good photos out of a pancake lens as they have done by pushing the megapixels and fixing it with software.

While I doubt that they are going to get as good as a DSLR they have improved to a point that a phone has essentially replaced a compact camera.

Re: Two littles

Because they'd locked AMD out of the market back back when via the anti competitive shenanigans that I still don't think they've paid the fines for, and didn't expect their only competition to produce a competitive CPU again.

That AMD produced a genuinely competitive chip despite having a total net worth of something like 1.5 billion in 2015 compared to Intel being worth a quarter trillion or so is to be fair pretty amazing.

That this chip happened to come around shortly before Intel got caught with their dodgy speculative execution code was doubly unfortunate for Intel, since AMD hadn't been doing dodgy process execution the intel parts losing ~20% of their performance made AMD's chips suddenly gain this much performance.

Re: It is about time

Probably because if you set things up so that nothing runs unless specifically authorised then the people who don't have a f*****g clue kick off because their programs don't work?

That's Nazi Propaganda from WW2.

As you will no doubt know, the ship lost back then was a coastal sailing yacht being sailed across an ocean for a new owner. Coastal sailing yacht's as well as race craft still have sails and precisely the same thing still happens in the same locations, ie Loss of masts in the southern ocean during a storm with the ship reduced to a sinking state:-

https://apnews.com/article/sports-europe-international-news-latin-america-europe-sailing-a5e76d241f1e4330a45544f7c86ba2cc

And despite that, a ship was diverted to sail 2 days out of it's way to pick her up because as I said in my original post, the response is directed these days rather than just hoping somebody sails within sight of your lifeboat.

Re: Whistleblower protection

Yes. It says "should not" and is a trivially worked around rule that doesn't provide any actual fine etc, rather than a short and simple bit of primary legislation that defines unfair treatment, and says "if treated unfairly as judged by the courts then the company treating the staff member unfairly will receive a fine of 100x the workers annual salary".

Which would pretty immediately end the problem.

Re: Sideloading no, better revenue model yes

The visible debate is really about money. If Apple can lower its tariffs (which others have already done), that's one way, but the real problem is that Epic doesn't want to hand off 30% of its revenue, and blames Apple for asking for it, conveniently foregoing the fact that they would not have the remaining 70% if it wasn't for Apple creating that eco system in the first place

If Apple hadn't created that eco system in the first place then everybody would be using either an *nix/android or a windows device, which don't charge you 30% of your revenue to run your applications.

If Apple charged a single rate of £100 for adding the application to the store (which would more than cover it's costs if the people checking things are spending less than an hour doing the checks) then the objections go away.

And this is the real issue; should a company be able to charge 30% of your revenue for running your application on their platform?

Oh, we can electrify lines alright. The issue as the article says is the economic feasibility of doing so.

Main lines are electrified, and the branch lines used by a couple of trains a day get a diesel train instead because it's cheaper, and it's apparently it's cheaper to design trains just for those lines than electrify all of them.

There are plenty of ways of doing this. Like many other people I am blocking my users from receiving programs, and also blocking them from running them just for good measure. You can actually stop office/adobe from running unauthorised scripts using group policy options available free of charge across your entire network in mere minutes.

However after a certain point one gets bored of arguing with people who want their systems configured to run everything, and then act surprised that eventually something runs that they didn't want that screws up everything on their network.

Re: Fix the existing problems before making a profit

I think that saying the hospitals are separate entities is slightly disingenuous. The hospitals are grouped together under regional trusts, which have between 1 and 9 hospitals depending on their size.

Have you worked in NHS IT, and if so do you recollect hospitals using the same systems as everybody else in the county?

Re: Wishful thinking...

Why bother to service Hubble? Asking SpaceX to launch the *pair* of unused spy scopes the NRO donated to NASA a decade back would surely be a better move.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_Office_space_telescope_donation_to_NASA