Posts by Tom 38

Re: Probably the bill themselves.

Probably making sure they weigh enough to be charged with intent to supply.

I can't write well - that's what attracted me to computers in the first place, I was fed up with my work being judged by its legibility rather than its quality.

Re: A-Level results

Hmm. Maths doesn't really change that much, so I'm dubious on this. In the late 90s, we prepared for our Maths A levels by doing past papers from the 50s onwards, all were on a par with the modern stuff. The older papers had less "hand holding" (eg, guiding you through the solution by asking intermediate questions), but A level questions don't have too much of that any way.

Re: Broken Implementation

I'm not sure this would work. How does the hash work?

qv acoustic fingerprinting

Acoustic fingerprints are not bitwise fingerprints, which must be sensitive to any small changes in the data. Acoustic fingerprints are more analogous to human fingerprints where small variations that are insignificant to the features the fingerprint uses are tolerated. One can imagine the case of a smeared human fingerprint impression which can accurately be matched to another fingerprint sample in a reference database; acoustic fingerprints work in a similar way.

Re: Social agenda

Just what are Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Global Corporates et al waiting on before redistributing all that wealth in order to help create a flatter, more rounded pyramid.

Funny couple of names you've chosen there. Bill Gates has a charitable foundation with $40 billion in endowments (and has pledged to donate the remaining 95% of his wealth on death), to which Warren Buffet has pledged to give 99% of his Berkshire Hathaway shares by or on his death (he's already donated >$10 billion).

A market economy creates some lopsided payoffs to participants. The right endowment of vocal chords, anatomical structure, physical strength, or mental powers can produce enormous piles of claim checks (stocks, bonds, and other forms of capital) on future national output. Proper selection of ancestors similarly can result in lifetime supplies of such tickets upon birth. If zero real investment returns diverted a bit greater portion of the national output from such stockholders to equally worthy and hardworking citizens lacking jackpot-producing talents, it would seem unlikely to pose such an insult to an equitable world as to risk Divine Intervention

Re: Not just meat

I have known 2 cats who steal cheese if given half a chance.

Do they use it in the mouse traps?

Re: I will be worse off

The article didn't mention that as freelance consultants we don't get sick pay either.

Freelance consultants work for their own companies, so if you are unhappy with the amount of sick pay that you have negotiated with yourself, take your self aside for a quiet drink and talk it through until both you and yourself are content with the perks and remuneration that you get for working for yourself.

Re: Nonce?

A "nonce" in cryptology is an arbitrary number made up and used once in a particular communication.

I would hope that there are nonces at all levels of government by now, they surely have 2FA...

Re: Oh look...

Apple Music arrives on Android in the Fall, as announced at WWDC.

Re: Not really thought about it before.

Thanks for sharing.

Re: My head exploded.

I think this is the same as "slider" burgers. It looks incomprehensible, surely they'd be more in to half pounders, but no, they just eat 24 tiny slider burgers.

Re: Legalese

If, for example, BT we're going to provide the "voice" service to a new customer using a fibre connection at the same price instead of a copper connection, would we still be insisting on them laying copper too?

No, and we don't. Where BT supply FTTH, they do not and will not supply a copper POTS phone line to your house. Your only option is to have a "Fibre Home Phone", which is backed by a battery in your premises.

They already do this, and consider this fulfilling USO.

Re: The four

Or just go back to our Victorian era sensibilities, where you could get an ounce of morphine from your local chemist if you so desired, and dispense with our outdated 20th century fascination with American influenced puritanical views that someone else knows best what you should and should not be putting in to your bodies.

Re: Unless your grid is entirely coal based

IC powered cars only ever get worse as they age.

It's not like batteries and bearings don't degrade.

Re: Why do we tell them this?

Military Intelligence?

Adrian: Once again we've got our friend from military intelligence. Can you tell us what you've found out about the enemy since you've been here?

Adrian as Gomer: Well, we ask people, 'Are you the enemy? And whoever says yes, we shoot them. [Pause] It's very difficult to find a Vietnamese man named Charlie. They're all named Nyugen or Doh or things like that. It's very difficult for me.

Re: Windows 10?

Pre SP1, XP was anything but good. I'd say fuckawful, actually. No security by default, firewall turned off, IE6 doing its awful, awful thing

People have such short memories, when IE 6 first came out, it was fucking amazing - when compared to all the different vagaries of IE 5, 5.01, 5.1, 5.2 and 5.5. I swear to god, each one of them required a different hack to get right. Firefox (or as we called it back then, Phoenix), didn't really exist yet apart from a beta that no-one other than us geeks used, and we still had to support Netscape 4.

Early XP was 2k with some extra candy, which was nice as 2k was NT 4 with USB and some candy.

People still used 98 and ME for gods sake. Some perspective before denigrating XP!

Makes perfect sense to me, he's saying it's fine to run around with a gun, as long as it is concealed.

Wait, that's not right.

Re: Lack of trust

It's not lack of trust, its that operating systems (in general) used to be cack, and so we all waited anxiously for the next one that might not be cack. Since W7, there is little to no need to upgrade for any reason other than planned obsolescence by the OS manufacturer, eg artificially limiting what features of D3D are available for a given OS.

Ah, memories of my first car, a Ford Fiesta with a dodgy alternator. Never stopped it with my feet, but it often needed its initial power with my feet..

Re: Shut it you tedious old windbag

"Free" in FOSS does not mean "zero money cost". It means "free of encumberances". Meaning, you *must* publish the source code when distributing binaries.

Free of encumbrances, apart from the one you mention in the next sentence?

BSD is FOSS, and doesn't have that encumbrance, and is used for the greatest and most widely shared software developments of the past 40 years. The internet wouldn't exist without BSD.

The main thing I dislike about Stallman and his devotees is that they think that only GPL is FOSS, and that any other license is a mistake. Being more free and reusable is a bad thing in their eyes.

Re: Hmmm?

How on earth can you follow it on an app?

I don't buy the app any more, partly because the app being shit is not a new thing, but mainly because F1 is less interesting (you didn't know who was going to win or why), and the reasons are simple - the app gives you data which you can follow to see what is going to happen. Watching on TV just lets you know what the excitable gents in the commentary box think from the TV footage that the event producer thinks is worth showing on TV at the time.

It doesn't tell you where the other cars are, it doesn't tell you what sector times the guy in 14th who has just put on the soft tyres has, or allow you to infer what would happen if the guy in 2nd did that right now. If you're a fan of a team other than the ones currently on top, you can track what they are doing, how their sector times compare to their best, when they should be coming in to pit, what tyre they should put on, will they be switching to a different strategy...

The app can be used to follow a race, if you can't watch it in any way, but mainly it is a way to better enjoy the experience of watching the race by giving you more data. When I did have the app, I never used it if I wasn't also watching the race.

Re: mSpy statement

Yes but in other news: MSpy admits hacking and data theft

Ahh, BBC. Hacking is downloading a file using wgetin putty. Would it still be hacking if they showed the same thing in chrome?

Must have got Rory to advise on the story.

Re: EFF = Extremely Foolish Fraudsters

AC is 100% right, EFF are only representing their interests, which are free and open access to information.

The bastards.

Stupid question here but why aren't 'the rivals' investing in dark fibre networks of their own...

My guess is because BT is able to deploy dark fibre much cheaper thanks to all the ducting...

Dark fibre == fibre you have installed that is not lit with communications. If you install fibre and are using it, its just called fibre.

BT installed masses of fibre throughout their network that is not lit up, because installing a bundle of fibre cores is similar in cost to deploying a single fibre, and only lit up what they needed, eg 8 cores out of 48.

This is to mandate them to allow other communication providers to light up the cores that BT are not using at a rate that is considered "fair", rather than forcing those providers to buy IP services from BT at whatever rate BT think they can get away with.

Re: There are times when Starbucks is the best choice

customer retention increases x% if staff use the customers names. In America. I can't speak for America (probably very similar, Americans aren't stupid) but in Europe it feels invasive, creepy and insincere.

I don't drink the black stuff, but I do buy a sandwich each day. I couldn't give a fuck if the people serving me remember my name (and I'm certainly not telling them), but I do like it when they remember enough that I like the mayonnaise on the bottom slice, then the chicken, bit of bacon on top and then the salad without me having to tell them every day.

I'd probably start going to a different store if they started asking my name...

Re: notoriously addictive?

Precisely why I flat refuse to buy any game that is "free" and then demands micro payments for even incremental progress.

I still haven't really forgiven Valve for TF2 - it was a great game, but it required skill. People don't like acquiring skill, so they "re-balanced" the game, and made upgrade items that basically meant you couldn't compete with someone who has the super duper set of items when you just have the stock items.

Re: "Ashamed Labourite"

Au contraire. In 1997, to the dismay of many of his Labour colleagues, Gordon Brown stuck to the Conservative spending plans for the next 2 years.

Government spending, sure. Have you never heard of PFI, whose purpose it is to take public spending off-book, so you can say "Hey, we're not spending much", all the while pushing the problems, oooh, 18 years down the line?

These bankrupt hospitals, they all had large injections of PFI cash post 97, and we're still paying for it.

Re: Gigabit home internet? Crikey!

I have gigabit, I have trouble saturating for more than a few seconds at a time, but saturating it is not the point - I can stream content at decent bitrates from home to my mobile devices (well, when Three play ball), I can play video games without worrying about any latency issues at all (1ms ping ftw), and cancelled my "hobby" colo box and replaced it with a small box in a cupboard.

I have lower latency to $JOBs colo than I do when I am actually at $JOB. I can video conference with 8+ people in HD without having the annoying dropouts that others do, and all of this means that I can spend more time working from home, since I only have to go in to $JOB when I have face-to-face meetings.

BT actually wired and lit my flat for FTTP, but their FTTP offerings are lame lame lame - artificially asynchronous and limited to 300Mb/30Mb, when what comes in to the Openreach box is 1.2Gbps. Plus, it is (was?) £15 more a month.

Re: While the salary is attractive

£28k is attractive? Please don't move to London.

I find this fascinating. What if someone (a member of the public) gained entrance and forcibly removed him?

We found the same thing very non-amusing when it happened 4 years ago in Iran.