Re: Vehicle Security
You'll need an environmental impact assessment. And an equal opportunities policy.
3223 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Mar 2010
Thank you sir! (Or madam) - Clearly I am in the upper bracket of El Reg commentards, as I remember when IBM held this crown, and various articles pointing out that they were in effect richer than several countries by miles ... this was in the 70s. I was surprised I had to read so many comments before it was mentioned.
Contemporary fanbois might do well to ponder this, and look where IBM is today.
Question: Why haven't the US authorities tried to pick him up in the UK? Our government is even more likely than the Swedes to bend over for the Americans.
I really wish people would stop pointing this out, since it brings the entire Assange circus crashing to the ground. Can't somebody at least try to pretend the US have asked ?
anyway, my prediction:
1) Amazon will tie up with one, or more major supermarket to piggyback onto their online shopping deliveries
2) As above, but to offer some sort of locker facility at the mega-stores.
Tesco have already subbed their cafe service to Costa, so I would suggest they are the more adventurous of the retailers.
As far as I can see it's a win-win for the retailers. Maybe I should patent the system ?
Surely the bottom line is the market is just completely saturated ? Apart from the dearth of apps, my Windows Phone (January 2011) isn't missing anything that would make me go out and get a new phone.
Ditto the Mrs HTC Wildfire (bought Dec 2011).
Ditto the lads Nokia 5800 (bought March 2009).
Therefore, for this household, it's completely irrelevant what the price of handsets is. We can't be the only one.
It depends ...
done *properly*, when the password is created, the app also creates a hashed code for each letter in the password. When you are prompted - it compares your input with the hash. Systems like this should be more secure, because even if you speak to an agent - you never give them your whole password (so they can't hightail it out back and hijack your account).
However, you highlight one thing: once you have entered your password, and pressed "return" you have absolutely no idea what happens to it. Which is why you should NEVER reuse passwords.
where no one needs to complain, for someone to get banged up.
I for one, am heartily sick, of seeing the criminal justice system being used to dictate some arbitrary morality upon society. I really have no interest in what people watch, or do amongst consenting adults, as long as no one else gets hurt. Endof.
Remember the extreme porn law ? Just taking a screencap of certain films, despite being BBFC approved will get you banged up. And you're forbidden to mention the clip came from a BBFC approved film in court.
you misunderstand what "profit" means.
To most people, profit is what you have, AFTER you have spent money on running your business - including things like R&D, and investing in infrastructure. In this meaning companies cannot whine that making less profit means less investment, because the investment is what you put in before profit.
However, on the basis, I have never heard a journalist bitchslap a pasty-faced spokesperson who dares to wibble on that without massive profits, you won't get investment, it must mean something different on planet corporate.
When I posted that comment, I was thinking more of a slightly creepy marketing dimension.
VM customers with TiVo are already in the vanguard of this. VM knows not only what you watch, and when, it also knows how you skip the ads, and how you channel surf. Put all that data together, and you have enough for some pretty smart targeted marketing.
Now, who do you think are behind the Lords ?
you're not. But do you swap buttons too ?
I went for a job interview recently, where they wanted you to sit a technical test. The PC was locked down, and the poor interviewer had to dig someone out of IT support to log in to change mouse settings.
One massive FAIL with Windows, is when you RDP into a box, it uses the boxes settiings, not the terminals - so you have to change settings on the box. Which is a real nuisance, if you are sharing a server, as I used to in a team. Every time I logged in, I had to swap buttons.
Also the Windows login screen defaults to right-handed.
Now Linux - or at least the NX protocol is much more sensible, and inherits mouse settings from the client.
Start of the year they upgraded me, and send me a new modem/router (not the superhub, the one down from that).
I have set my network up to be 192.168.1.x . Their poxy router simply couldn't be configured to take that - and it couldn't be put into modem mode to allow me to use my existing router. Repeated calls to overseas just put me through the same steps again and again, with the "technician" expressing surprised when I got the error message about not being able to use that address.
In the end I had to reconfigure my network.
one of the tricks which most impressed me was their realising that because the number of entries in the data structure was limited to quite a small number, they could shrink the index from 2^16 to 2^4, which left them 12 extra bits in the datastructure to cram with other data, thus reducing the memory footprint, and being able to load into the Extended Memory.
Kids today, really have no idea.
reminds me of my first company ... logistics software, written in DOS, under a windows wrapper. We had an issue where the reporting package (Foxpro) just would not run in under 16Mb (yes, Mb !!!!!) of RAM. So we had to up the minimum spec - I had to put a check in the installation script.
Anyway, one of DOS programmers pointed out that when the DOS code needed more memory, they had to rewrite it (remember Memmaker ?). But when the windows code needed more memory, they just upped the spec. These were real old-school coders who got excited by trimming a byte of a routine in assembler ...
The only reason I could think of is to get onto the IE9+ stream. But corporately, why do that ? The excuse of "security" with IE6 only holds water if you are using it in the wild. I would imagine a great deal of companies using it (like HMRC) will be driving in-house intranet apps, so much less risky than just surfing the web in general.
The key test for *anything* is (1) does it work ?, and (2) is there any reason not to continue using it ?
With hardware, then (2) tends to rear it's head with age, until you get the answer "we might not be able to fix it again" - at which point a replacement is mandated.
However, software can't "wear out", so judging (2) tends to be harder.
Your comment was immature in the extreme, and marks you out as someone who has never worked in the real world (I guess it's Uni holidays now). Any change is a risk. So unless you are changing to mitigate a bigger risk, then you shouldn't be changing at all.
one company I worked for in 2007 had virtualised all their desktops into a citrix farm. Result was everyone (apart from the IT guys and developers) just had a thin-client terminal. Great for homeworking - just plug into your router, and it would connect to your desktop.
Thing is by doing this, the IT guys felt they were pretty insulated from needing to upgrade in a hurry ... any problems - security or otherwise, they could just magic up another box.
Last I chatted with them, there was still no date for upgrading from XP. The only other desktops were available to the developers, for testing websites the public used.
I was intrigued, on holiday in Spain to notice they use CHIP & PIN *and* signatures. Payments made without proof of signature will be covered by the merchant, not the bank. Hence shops are extremely motivated to check ID with cards. Of course it helps they have ID cards.
Tinfoil hat time ?
I don't think too many people with experience are surprised. We create an artificial time structure (weeks, months) and the proceed to centre our activities around them. Hence "Friday afternoon cars".
That said, it is intriguing there are so many problems with the Olympics major sporting event underway ... I wonder if there's a capacity bottleneck somewhere ?
I don't think things will pan out that way.
Windows Phone 7 is dead to me. I don't really know if it's a good OS, or a bad OS. All I know, is that I can't get any apps for it. In fact, the El Reg app is a rare beast - one that's offered over iOS, Android and WP7(.5).
With such a dearth of apps out there - and no sign'ts of it improving, I can't see WP8 appealing to anyone. The only market segment *might* be corporates. But I can't see senior staff being impressed when they realise they'd have to carry 2 phones, to keep the apps they like from their iPhones.
(note, I didn't say "happy")
We moved in 10 years ago, when Telewest were cable providers. Since they offered an all-in-one phone,TV and dial-up (!) package, we joined. The only criteria then[1] was "anybody but BT". We have stayed with them, and taken advantage of various promotions to get 6 months free broadband (in 2004), a free upgrade to V+ (2008) and this year a free upgrade to TiVo and the basic 30MBs package (which needed a new modem).
In that time, we've had 1 outage on the broadband. I think they had lost the pairing of the modem with the network, as I called up, and had to quote the modem MAC address. Fixed 5 minutes later.
Speed is pretty much as advertised. Never experienced issues with traffic shaping - maybe because I just set downloads running on my 24/7 server. When they're there, they're there. My only grumble is the slightly od mix of channels on the "basic" TV package. But since we're not sports fans, and our son is way past the cartoon network stage, we're not missing much - it's be nice to have Discovery HD for example. But we manage without.
Customer service on the whole is acceptable - yes you can have some problems with the offshore guys, but if things get too bad, hang up, redial, and select the "I'm leaving you option" - you'll get a UK person, who will knock a few quid off, or give you a discount on a new service.
[1]When I became a homeworker, 3 years ago, I got lumbered with a BT Openreach Broadband connection. The saga of getting it installed, and activated, and the billing sorted was WORSE than I feared. Since I was already expecting a series of missed appointments, incomplete work, and messed up billing, they really went some to go under a bar already set at -10.
Every so often, just for fun, I run a speed test on both connections. Here's todays results:
BT: Ping 39ms DL: 4.87Mb/s UL: 0.72 MBs
VM: Ping 20ms DL: 17.91 Mb/s UL: 1.98 MBs
and that's real. I can download a 1 hour programme in 3 minutes.
Compare and contrast with the in-laws who live a mile away, and have been with every combination of non-Virgin there is ... I stopped counting at the 5th incident they had where they lost internet connectivity in 3 months. Each time they had a round robin of calls between BT and the ISP.
I know VM are a premium service. But that premium saves a lot of hassle should things go wrong.
OK, I'm never going to be a paid Linux sysadmin. But when I started dabbling with Linux, about 5 years ago now (slight pause for that to register) the one tool which I stumbled across which transformed my experience was Webmin.
Despite being able to remember DOS 2.0, I am unashamedly a GUI fan. My argument is a *good* GUI can help enforce some sort of understanding of what's going on underneath - a classic example being an input field that is greyed out unless a checkbox is ticked. The GUI shows you the relation between the two.
as I've only been following LOHAN sproadically (and that pic of the two old geezers really isn't selling it to me) but is there no scope for an ignitionless system ? ISTR the return motors on the Lunar Lander were designed to avoid the need for anything that could go wrong.
Anyway - inspiring stuff. I speak as someone who turned down a job with the ESA in 1988 - one of my regrets.
which has nothing to do with piracy, and everything to do with a judicial system starting to assert it's control over the internet.
Once the principle is accepted by the sheeple (bearing in mind how much of the internet we have lost in the name of child pornography, and terrorism) it's a simple administrative task to get whatever the government of the day doesn't like banned.
Hasn't Google already had to nobble autocomplete in China ?
Why is holding steady at a billion users seen as a failure?
Because for FB to deliver to those people who bought shares in it, it actually has to make more money than it spends over a sustained period of time. Up till now, all of FBs profits have been derived from the fact that there were X+y users now compared to a point in the past. And it's the "+y" that generated the income. By drawing in companies who spent money advertising.
FBs business model is effectively a ponzi scheme. Very slick. Very popular. Highly visible. But very vulnerable to stagnation.
I still think at some point, we are going to see a FB "premium" account. Doubtless slickly marketed. Probably starting out around $10/£10 per month. Maybe with a discount, if you get more "friends" to sign up. Alternatively, you will start seeing paid-for content creeping in. Maybe premium groups you need to pay (or subscribe) to join.
Of course the one thing that many people *would* pay for is to lose the ads. But that wouldn't go down too well with the big companies paying (or in GMs case, not paying) to peddle their wares on FB.
The move by FB to insist on real identities should have been a wake-up call.
My main concern about FB as a non-FBer, is it's probably already possible to trawl FB, with it's users and friends, and pinpoint people who aren't on FB - and then profile them, based on the people they know who *do* use FB. I know my email address has been hoovered into FB when people I know have signed up. So FB knows I exist, who my friends are, and what they like. Imagine what this data is worth to a clever marketing company ?
Not so silly - it's what we need to teach kids to do more of.
With what seems like man+dog launching stratospheric balloons (James May ????) I've vaguely wondered about this too. ISTR talk that you need to watchout for pylons
Regarding the descent, the only thing I can think of is that statistically, it's so unlikely a falling weather balloon will hit someone, it's regarded as acceptable. However, that said, a few years ago, we (Dad & I) found a weather balloon plus payload tangled up in a tree at his garage yard, in Hounslow - and I would not want that hitting me on the head. ISTR it had a little inventory tag asking nicely to call the Met Office, who came and collected it. It did have a rather Heath Robinson appearance, and was spray painted silver.
they can only act on what they are given. And it wouldn't really be a great advert, or morale booster, if they had to assume that every arrest *could* be wrong. Which means they were acting in "good faith".
If there's one thing we should have learned by now, it's that "good faith" excuses anything, and negates the need for recompense. Ask people whose doors have been kicked in wrongly by the police who then (lawfully) refuse to pay for repairs.
if you think that having your fingerprints and DNA taken is the worst part about being arrested, then you really need a course in reality.
There have been many cases where people, wrongly accused of a particularly heinous crime (I really hope you don't need some examples) have had there lives ruined. Been forced to move house. Had marriages fail. Denied access to their children. Been unable to find a job. Resulting in more than one suicide.
How do you think your life would fare, if cops took your door down at 5am, dragged you in your underwear into a van, shouting at the top of their voices that you were being arrested on suspicion of sexual offences against a child ?
If you consider these an acceptable number of errors, then you are part of the problem.
*I* don't. Especially in light of the eye-watering sums these systems are costing us.
Luckily neither of the two misidentified people was being trailled by the murderous incompetent goons of the anti-terrorit squad.