* Posts by Adrian Midgley 1

502 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jun 2009

Page:

Cash, fear and uncertainty: The Holy Trinity of Bitcoin and blockchain

Adrian Midgley 1

Money is promises

Serialised, abstracted, fungible promises.

As the promises are less certainly believed, inflation occurs, and/or at some critical point the currency stops being money.

Tories tend to think money is real stuff, a Thing, and also that they should naturally have it.

UK web host 123-Reg goes TITSUP, customer servers evaporate

Adrian Midgley 1

expects backups not included to mean

backups are included.

Optimistic, I think.

If only on the dictionary front.

I bless the reins down on .africa ... Dot-word injunction hits ICANN

Adrian Midgley 1

Rather a long TLD

compared to the transparent good sense of the originators of the original set.

Marketeers and politicians displaced the engineers there?

SpaceX's Musk: We'll reuse today's Falcon 9 rocket within 2 months

Adrian Midgley 1

Re: "Merlin engines"?

They knew it. The spitfire gets thrust from its radiators even.

ExoMars probe narrowly avoids death, still in peril after rocket snafu

Adrian Midgley 1

Mars atmosphere no less difficult

The gravity is lower, so although the pressure is low at Mars ground level, the atmosphere tails off more gradually.

Last year’s Android finally overtakes year-before-last’s Android

Adrian Midgley 1

One reason I like Nexus

Plain, current, Android.

Microsoft has crafted a switch OS on Debian Linux. Repeat, a switch OS on Debian Linux

Adrian Midgley 1

Embrace

Extend

And brand it.

I wonder if MS salesdroids even notice they are selling what they used to say was no good, more expensive, illegal and cancerous now.

UN rapporteur: 'Bad example' UK should bin the Snoopers' Charter

Adrian Midgley 1

No surprise there

Is there.

Brits still not happy about commercial companies using their healthcare data

Adrian Midgley 1

I can recall no instance of a believable

indication anyone in charge of any of these central national projects regards data as anyone elses if they want it. And they do, they want it all, they want it now, and they want to share it wherever their administrative or political boss wants to share it.

And it can't be anonymised.

More and more Brits are using ad-blockers, says survey

Adrian Midgley 1

HM SoS for Culture regards the adverts

as the bit citizens should be obliged to watch.

The rest, not so much.

Micropayments anyone?

Adrian Midgley 1

The next step in the war of manners

is to download the ads...

into a place where they are not seen.

I suppose one might add punishment, by one's ushabti automagically clicking the links in those ads...

PDF redaction is hard, NSW Medical Council finds out - the hard way

Adrian Midgley 1

Not using PDFs...

and indeed anything other than text where pictures are not needed seems to be indicated.

Photographer hassled by Port of Tyne for filming a sign on a wall

Adrian Midgley 1

Re: Both sides didnt help

Not asking, of course. Telling.

Adrian Midgley 1

The problem is not the mistake...

it is the organisation insisting it is not a mistake, by making stuff up.

The Chairman of the Board and CEO should have a personal interest in this, since it is indicative of an approach there is no reason shown to disbelieve would apply to actual safety and security problems - to hide it and bluster rather than sort it out.

IANAL, but it also sounds rather like an assault.

Gov opens consultation on how to best to use your data

Adrian Midgley 1

If this lot can get hold of it ...

they'll sell it to someone who won't give access back.

Zombie OS lurches through Royal Melbourne Hospital spreading virus

Adrian Midgley 1

Buying closed source and running

it in Windows.

Which way did it go badly this time?

North Korean operating system is a surveillance state's tour de force

Adrian Midgley 1

Plain ASCII Text files

have much to commend them in many ways.

Adrian Midgley 1

Current UK gov likely to quite like this...

Usual problems apply.

Microsoft extends Internet Explorer 8 desktop lifeline to upgrade laggards

Adrian Midgley 1

NHS rather standard

though.

Oxford Uni opens infosec ivory tower in Melbourne

Adrian Midgley 1

A nice city, also

Rotating through there would enhance many lives.

Per-core licences coming to Windows Server and System Center 2016

Adrian Midgley 1

Is the software configurable to cores?

A licence to run on 2 cores could reasonably be expected to cause the software to run on 2 cores, etc.

That would leave 62 free to do something useful with. Else useful if you like.

Russia's blanket phone spying busted Europe's human rights laws

Adrian Midgley 1

ECHR is not EU

So you might like to rewrite your question/response/whatever it is accordingly.

I don't think it leaves anything, but YMMV.

IANAL

Investigatory Powers Tribunal scraps its first annual report

Adrian Midgley 1

Attempting to convey untrustworthiness or incompetence

perhaps.

Nuisance call blocking firms fined £170,000 ... for making nuisance calls

Adrian Midgley 1

Listing the people running such companies

and if the journalist time is available digging and following them would be a service to society.

Remember Windows 1.0? It's been 30 years (and you're officially old)

Adrian Midgley 1

NT4 and the DOSSHELL

were also worth remembering.

TalkTalk attack: 'No legal obligation to encrypt customer bank details', says chief

Adrian Midgley 1

In what way do you assert that excerpt requires

encryption?

Or indeed any specific technical approach.

As remarked above, the system contains the data must also contain a means to access the data.

As remarked elsewhere, when we think encryption is the answer we probably do not destined encryption, or our problem.

Terror in the Chernobyl dead zone: Life - of a wild kind - burgeons

Adrian Midgley 1

Trailing bat exposers? Citation

Needed for that one please.

My impression is occasional bats and birds bounce off a blade in the usual way but most manage to apply the results of millennia of evolution and fly round.

Adrian Midgley 1
FAIL

We have some data points from CT etc

Radiologists pay careful attention to population accumulation of diagnostic radiation and assert, I think on sound evidence, that it matters.

Microsoft's top lawyer: I have a cunning plan ... to rescue sunk safe harbor agreement

Adrian Midgley 1

Two of the problems are

that the US gov has demonstrated itself untrustworthy, and that this is proposed by Microsoft, who fall short of paragonhood of virtue in that respect as well.

GNU Foundation ideas might get a better reception, intransigent and Idealist being exactly what is lacking.

Junk your IT. Now. Before it drags you under

Adrian Midgley 1

Marketeers prevent maintenance, not age

mainly.

Old software is as maintainable as it ever was. If it is open source then nobody can prevent you from having it maintained.

Leaving the main interface elements (of which there tend to be too many in eg Word) unchanged and refactoring the innards should avoid slowdowns of a couple of sorts.

VMware unleashes Linux on the (virtual) desktop

Adrian Midgley 1

Re: Sigh...

We don't.

Who are you, and what is your source.

Of knowledge, or of funding?

Australian Prime Minister runs private email server

Adrian Midgley 1

Why does he need to explain a budget for

hiring tech services to run his email?

You want the details of his word processor? Maps? Cobblers?

I expect he'll be busier now though, and have people offereing assistance with such trivia, and good luck to

Him.

Please don't encourage laws saying you can't run your email server and I can't and only a state licensed operator may do so and charge what they like, it isn't in any of our interests.

him.

How much do UK cops pay for Microsoft licences? £30 a head or £137? Both

Adrian Midgley 1

And FLOSS for Scottish Central

They ditched MS Office some years ago, IIRC. Have they dumped the operating systems as well yet?

Top QLD sex shop cops Cryptowall lock; cops flop as state biz popped

Adrian Midgley 1

Rsync: less time by far

If you backup version changes using rsync rather than copying the whole lot it will take little time.

Apple's TimeMachine does something similar but doesn't play nicely.

Volkswagen used software to CHEAT on AIR POLLUTION tests, alleges US gov

Adrian Midgley 1

Increased CO2 forces temperature

upward.

Correlation

Definitive

Proved amount

Define you as a denialist.

Done the research.

NHS to go paperless by 2020. No, really, it will, says gros fromage

Adrian Midgley 1

Last century I worked out how to reduce paper use in the NHS...

For each organisation count the sheets of paper (as A4) bought last year.

Buy 10% less for this year.

Iterate.

About now the admin people would have used up all the improvement available from writing on both sides of each sheet.

You want to DISRUPT my TECH? How about I DISRUPT your FACE?

Adrian Midgley 1

Steve spends most of his time now with Ministers

telling them how the NHS should work.

Wikipedia’s biggest scandal: Industrial-scale blackmail

Adrian Midgley 1

I think Captain Scarlet would go under

Anderson, would it not? Along with various other characters. In the same way Jane Eyre belongs in a book.

There's a good article about the artificial induction of immunity and another about Benjamin Jesty. Most of the former is as I originally wrote it, which I like, and most of the latter is added by other people, which I like.

Parts of The Register are a good advert for professional journalism... and parts are not.

Adrian Midgley 1

How is this Wikipedia's scandal?

People doing things they absolutely should not do with it to publicise their business were then targeted by criminals.

Not WP.

Linux 4.2 release 'possible' for next week, if Linus feels good

Adrian Midgley 1

I'd prefer to have it right rather than

soon, but you can have it now of course, just download the current RC.

CEOs do tend to lie about things, no?

Windows 10 marks the end of 'pay once, use forever' software

Adrian Midgley 1

Pay never and use forever sound good?

Since 1984, GNU.

Exploding Power Bars: EE couldn't even get the CE safety mark right

Adrian Midgley 1

fonts and such

I'm interested in the things blowing up.

I'm not interested in the font.

Space Station 'nauts dive for cover from flying Soviet junk

Adrian Midgley 1

there isn't a one way system, but almost everything in orbit

was put there going the same way round[1].

What differs is the inclination of the orbits, up to about 90 degrees if you consider polar orbits, but mostly only a few degrees.

[1] Because the delta-V is 2000mph less if you launch with the Earth's rotation from the equator than if you launch against it.

Privacy campaigners question credibility of NHS ‘endorsed’ apps

Adrian Midgley 1

Optimism

We've known for generations how to prevent many illnesses, and not only is this poorly applied by the people who have to apply it - the people - but they elect governments that will sell off school playing fields ...

Rapid high-tech fixes for specific conditions whether inherited or acquired are more in the arena of healthcare, or medicine, and while personal data and opinionated systems with hinting engines may well be interesting, the data doesn't need to be collected on everyone in advance to make it work.

Police robot duo storm Colorado house, end four-day siege

Adrian Midgley 1

It isn't clear what

they wanted to grab him for.

Did they say?

UK.gov confirms it's binned extended Windows XP support

Adrian Midgley 1

Re: What next ?

No. Although as always people who can make headings out of big bold text will believe their familiarity should lead IT policy for others...

Malfunctioning Russian supply podule EXPLODES above Pacific

Adrian Midgley 1

You think it will come straight down?

onto the terminal below it, which has been constructed with the knowledge that a break is possible, and that that will cause severe damage?

It won't come straight down.

The cable low down is quite light.

Avoiding putting things in one direction along the plane of the cable - in an area which is likely to be mostly water - doesn't seem a major task.

Adrian Midgley 1

Re: @Remy: There is extensive

prior work on this.

Millions of voters are missing: It’s another #GovtDigiShambles

Adrian Midgley 1

But a (voting) poll

is also a counting of heads.

Siri, you're fired: Microsoft Cortana's elbows into iOS, Android

Adrian Midgley 1

Bob has had

a sex change.

Page: