Posts by Primus Secundus Tertius 1535 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Oct 2010
I recently went through the nauseous procedure of reporting a telephone fault to BT, and ended up on a chat line, purportedly to a person "somewhere".
But when you are on the line to someone with limited English working from a script, you wonder if in fact you are talking to a robot - the Turing test.
@trickster
Sir or Madam,
You vastly overestimate the extent to which They are interested in Us. Believe me, I went to a privileged university with some of Them.
We/Us are merely statistics, 60 million of Us in the UK. Cheap computer hardware is not here to benefit Us but to benefit the Googleocracy that collects statistics about us on a huge scale.
@Peter 26
"Why ..." may be a rhetorical question, but here is my suugested answer.
By and large, the private sector does not do deep, fundamental innovation. Minor incremental updates, yes, but real new thinking is rare. They employ doers and sellers, not thinkers.
So these things need to be hatched in the universities or other research establishments.
@AC (1st)
Outside the technical readership of El Reg there are many people who say internet porn is wrong, it should be stopped, and the techies should stop whingeing and just stop the porn.
I once read that automatic telephone exchanges were invented by somebody annoyed beyond endurance after his calls to company A were connected to company B because B had bribed the operators. The telephone industry has matured, and the computer industry will have to do the same.
I object to the way the Telegraph now wants one to pay for access to much of the Internet version. If other publications can give free copies of printed papers, it must be even cheaper to offer Internet versions for free.
I particularly object to being expected to pay to see readers' letters, which come to them for free.
In an equilibrium system the two chiralities are likely to be equally probable. But Life is not an equilibrium system, it is a steady-state non-equilibrium system (SSNES). Or what my physics lecturers called a "dissipative system".
It is easy to imagine abiotic systems that are SSNES. For example, a steady stream of water (high pressure, high temperature) through volcanic rocks in a chemically reducing environment. My question is whether in such a SSNES one chirality could come to dominate.
Suitable experiments are needed.
Particularly in the voluntary sector there are many data sets of just a few hundred or a few thousand rows. I did say in an earlier comment that an office of 20 people using a serious-sized system would need a full scale database. Even then, Access is useful for design and prototype work, and for client side rather than server side in large systems.
"I'd have thought that any self-respecting data analyst would have done that before creating the tables. It's called normalisation, been around for about 45 years."
I would have thought that, too; then I had to deal with the systems I inherited. Created by ordinary office workers or business people, who do know a lot about their business but are not logicians and data analysts.
This is the "real" world, right; though a mathematician might say it is "complex".
MS Access makes it much easier to pick up the pieces and refashion them into your ideal normalised state.
[No, I do not work for Microsoft, never have, and am now enjoying my retirement so never will.]
It is not just the relational database itself that matters, but also the facilities that come with it. I am thinking specifically of the way Access can move fields from large records into separate tables. This means, for example, that city and county names can be defined just once and used consistently. So if you are inheriting a clunky old data set, you can sharpen it up.
Libre Office database can do the relational joins, but not the data reforming.
Yes, Access is OK for one or two users but not an office with 20 users. You then use Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, ... I believe SQL Server does have various tools. Maybe the other products do: I look forward to further comments from Reg users.
Thank you, Spacedinvader, for that clarification.
It is a pity the Reg could not make it that clear in the first place. They seem to have lost all their science-qualified writers who could examine critically a press release or abstract rather than just copying the words.
In the "good old days" banks really did know their cutomers: they would recognise us when we walked in. Also, we could telephone our branch and they would recognise our voice over the phone.
One of the best security measures is still human recognition of voices over the plain old telephone.
Mind you, i remember inheriting a club/society account where the old bank statements were the legendary hand-written things.
Ah, the conspiracy theory rather than the cockup theory.
But usually it is a cockup. I blame modern education, which tells children to be creative rather than telling them to check their work.
I seem to remember a recent celbrated case, possibly for SSH, where the offending code had been checked in at 11.30pm on New Years Eve. How to inspire confidence - NOT.
@Kozicki
What depresses me is that I pay a fortune in tax for what passes for the education of those people.
Under the PST system of taxation:
1. The rich would pay for defence and foreign policy.
2. The middle classes would pay for the police.
3. The working classes would pay for social security.
Education would be paid for by private fees and charitable endowments.
That way each class pays tax for the things it needs most.
@Dave 15
In 1933 Germans voted for the alternative, Adolf. It was a long time before they had another proper vote, especially in the eastern zone.
Politics is not as easy as it may seem, especially when you are deling with real people. If you think your opinions are worth so much more than those of current politicians, then offer yourself to the people.
1. So the report from Italy is in all-capitals. They could have used MS Word on the original document, see below:
Original: CAPS-LOCK ON.
Sentence case: Caps-lock on.
A bit more difficult with a pdf, of course.
2. Hopefully the use of hopefully at the beginning of sentence, which is a German-American mistranslation of hoffentlich, will be banned by the sub-editors at el Reg.
Yesterday the big story was that some android phones ring home to China with detailed user information. Yet posters above whinge at the very limited measures sought by the British government to protect the nation from its enemies.
Yes,enemies; this is a wicked world and some people out there really do want to humiliate and exterminate our nation, for profit or for fanatical reasons.
Or to put in another way: the minds of men are not blank slates imbued with natural goodness.
Some people have no sense of proportion.
My initial thought is that a computer could analyse the neural network and produce an equivalent flowchart. If it then checks for consistency the results might be interesting.
But then I ask myself what kind of flowchart would be the result. Possibly full of decision boxes, each with many outputs: case statements rather than if-then-else statements. Such a raw flowchart would be impossible for most of us to comprehend.
So my next question is whether such a flowchart could be restructured into a form we can understand. If so, would it still be too big to be understood?
As I understand it, Windows 8 and 10 come with MS Defender, a descendant product of Swcurity Essentials. But in Windows 7 you have to go and get Security Essentials. Obviously best to go direct to MSFT, before some pirate screen recommends its own software.
Sec. Ess. is no longer supported in XP, so you need something else. Lots of legit products will do a single scan your machine for free, but for continuous protection against emails and websites you have to pay.
True, you can't corrupt a pencil.
But you can screw up the electronic registers of voters. At a recent(*) election in London early voters were turned away because their names were not on the list. This was rectified by mid morning, but not every early bird returned to vote.
That incident was regarded as cock-up, not conspiracy. But next time?
(*)2015 or 2016, I think.
The earliest indications of dark matter related to rotation rates within our own galaxy and other specific galaxies, rather than the whole visible universe. So those dark masses must still exist.
[Edit] I have just seen the comment above from titter-ye-not, who actually explains it as opposed to my bare claim.
The mainstream civil service hates techies. Look at how they killed off the scientific civil service. In 2001 there was an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, which caused an election to be deferred. It was clear that there was nobody within government who actually knew anything.
Instead we have the curse of managerialism.
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