Posts by Primus Secundus Tertius 1535 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Oct 2010
No, that is an absurdity. The few remaining big boys who run the network could easily do it with IPV4 between each other. Ordinary office users can mostly manage with a local net, e.g. 10.x.y.z, or IPV6 to make their system impenetrable to system engineers, hackers, ... Shopping, banking, access to el Reg, ... are all done by name, i.e. by DNS. It should be invisible to the user whether DNS goes via IPV4 or IPV6.
As often happens in the pages of el Reg, the comments here are more informative about the situation than the original article. Thank you, fellow commenters. I hope the ACs are not found out and punished; the NHS is known to be vindictive.
The root problem remains. How much do YOU want to pay for the health of other people?
@AC - "I'm sure when Hitler came to power…"
During the English Civil War, there was a lot of grief for the political classes, but for most of our ancestors life just carried on more or less as usual. The King had been accused of trying to ignore parliament; but then Cromwell famously told parliament to get lost.
After Cromwell's death, the Good and the Great decided to restore the monarchy under negotiated terms. The Restoration was a time of great joy: not for the political changes but because it was the end of Puritanism, which had been a much greater offence against the Englishman's ideal of robust common sense within a Merrie England.
There is far too much Puritanism in modern life. The West needs changes akin to the Restoration, which would end the need for Big Brother to pry into our Internet usage.
I don't expect my car to be "updated" every month. Why should I have to put up with that for my computer?
The answer, I suppose, is that computers are orders of magnitude more complicated. I therefore have doubts about the results of human work subject to commercial necessities. Would I trust a CPU + other bits designed by AI? Hahahahahahahaha.
I do wonder whether in the secret world somebody has a validated toolchain of hardware and software.
"These policies seek to maintain the perception that our borderless, open Internet can be managed, bounded, and conformed to fit with local laws."
What a typical US contempt for the laws of sovereign states except for themselves. Airlines are a world-wide business but have to respect local laws, as do shipping lines and even motorists driving about the world. The same should apply to the Internet. OK, there are problems; but that is what techies are for, to solve problems, not to just give up.
Charities in the UK can claim a form of tax relief called Gift Aid. I am responsible for one such charity.
HMRC (the British tax authority) requires claims to be submitted as a spreadsheet in .ods format, using a template they provide. Except there are two templates: one for files created by Excel 2010 or later, and the other for files created with Libre Office. (Other spreadsheet programs are not guaranteed to work.)
Two ods formats! So much for a unified open document strategy.
@Kew
Your point about libraries is important. It is easy to blame the coder for faults in top level logic. But even that can be unjust. I have seen design reviews where top level faults were nodded through because, for all its faults the document was there, the milestone nominally met, and management did not want to "delay" the project.
The only answer is to insist that corporations are liable. However, it will still take a few court cases where companies are punished before the beancounters accept that logic on a large scale must be done properly.
But who is going to check the libraries used by specific apps, and the operating systems under which those apps run?
@McIntyre
Yes, Acrobat can convert pdf back to doc. I have done it regularly. I am a proof reader for the magazine published by a small voluntary organisation. The Editor sends early drafts of the mag to us as pdf from her desktop publisher, but I want to run the text past the Word spellcheck.
First one should use the Acrobat facility to add tags. With tags in place, the Word output is less disjointed. Running headers and footers are eliminated, but page breaks still seem to be a problem. If they split a sentence, Word complains there is no capital letter for the first word on the next page. Material in text boxes often seems to get corrupted. However, the exercise does manage to spot a useful number of faults in the draft text.
Recently, after using Word 2013 for over three years, I learned that it could import pdf as text, that can then be spellchecked. This yields better results than export from Acrobat. But it seems to want pdf from dtp programs, rather than from OCR programs; the latter come through as graphics, not text.
There are just over 8,000 hours per year. So 4MWh per year is about 500 Watts of power.
Raw sunlight is up to 1 KW per square metre. Some 10% of that becomes electricity. Therefore about 5 square metres of roof is covered in solar cells.
An ordinary house then, not a Gates mansion.
'…fellow Googler reading: "You're a misogynist and a terrible human. I will keep hounding you until one of us is fired. Fuck you."
That employee was given a "final warning" from Google bosses, we're told.'
Damore is fired for writing a carefully argued statistical paper. The other person is allowed to stay despite an offensive rant. That is what happens when political correctness is allowed to trump rational argument.
@Bob
Why I love the ribbon.
1. The initial display is two-dimensional rather than one-d. So you see more of the detailed options at a glance.
2. You click on a ribbon option and it brings down a sub-list. So the third dimension is accessible with one click, rather than two. It means you have a better idea of where to start when looking for a less common option.
@ smudge
Many people would say that in Britain, general elections do deliver the will of the people. 1945, 1979, 1997, even 2010 with its indecisive result.
Problems arise in deeply divided places such as Ireland and Belgium. The lesson is that democracy only works if there is sufficient consensus or apathy.
Politicians rarely discuss apathy, because apathy causes high falutin' political verbosity to dissolve.
I am surprised that Mars is described as a cold rock. 99% of Earth by volume is at white heat or above. Mars is smaller, and will be cooler; and its core has solidified. But then, the central part of Earth's core is reckoned to be solid.
So I suggest Mars is not stone cold, so to speak (except for the surface).
@Mark 85
No, we have not seen them. As the article says, “there is not the slightest chance of observing these planets directly”. We have inferred their existence, but as usual the headline misleads.
The circumstances make it a one-way thing. So they have not seen us nor even the many interstellar planets in our own galaxy. Unless they are very advanced...
As a young man, a long time ago, I rode a motor bike. Like you, I gave priority to looking after number one. I found one had to ride on the assumption that other road users simply did not see you.
The optical laws of reflection seem to treat bikers as a special case, and remove a biker image from the mirror's field of view.
There has been some chatter in the media about ring-fencing the NHS budget. I reply that it is the smaller budgets that need to be ring-fenced, to protect them against raids from the big boys of the NHS and the Social Services.
So ring-fence the defence budget and the roads budget.
I was shown around the Telegraph on a visit a year or two ago. Or rather, shown into a gallery from which we could look out over the vast publishing room, full of computers and people but not a sub-editor to be seen.
They seem to be lacking something as an employer. Whenever I read The Times, I recognise so many names as former Telegraph writers. Murdoch must be doing something right.
I am surprised that El Reg's former journo, Chris Williams, has survived so long at the Telegraph.
My dream of AI would be a computer system that could listen to a meeting through one or more microphones. Shortly after the end of the meeting it would email a coherent set of minutes to everybody concerned.
It will have established who was present and which other people should receive the minutes. It will have taken remarks that were made in the "wrong" part of the meeting and put them into the correct section. It will present the pros and cons for each proposal rather than a verbatim rendering of each speaker.
I wait, patiently but with little expectation.
I have a theory that the various underground factories built during WW2 were later turned to manufacturing artificial wine. That is where all the German wine comes from, distributed through pipelines around Europe and beyond. Sometimes oil, sometimes wine, sometimes natural gas; there may be problems during the switch from one to another.
All the pictures of vineyards and happy peasants are just a sales puff by the wine industry.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
