Posts by handleoclast 1287 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jan 2012
@Anonymous Coward
If you search for me on Google then nothing comes up and I want to keep it that way.
I just searched for you on Google and shitloads of stuff came up. You're all over the place, although a lot of it is on El Reg. Very contradictory at times, almost as if you had Dissociative Identity Disorder.
Why? Because they can.
Nope, because they hope they can use it to political advantage. Like finding dirt on their political opponents. Like finding the terrible people who propose voting the other bastards into power so they can be targeted.
It's just another step along the way to authoritarian totalitarianism. Gotta do it while we're still in power because if the other guys get into power they'll do it and use it against us.
Here's where it gets interesting (for "they've just used 1984 as a handbook again" values of interesting).
Everyone will have to use the official crypto. So the bad guys use their own crypto which is then superencrypted with the official crypto. Even with deep-packet inspection it all seems kosher (or al Halal).
The only way the authorities could tell that anyone was using good crypto underneath the official crypto is to decrypt all official crypto. Just to see if any bad guys are using good crypto underneath it.
So you can pretty much guarantee that this is what will happen. There might be legislation justifying it or, more likely, it will just be done illegally (like so much else in the war against terraist paedophiles). And once they're decrypting everyone's stuff, eventually they'll start checking for other activities (again, there might be legislation permitting this or they might do it illegally).
Experience has shown that slippery slopes are the norm when the spooks are involved, and eventually some local council employee will be checking your messages to see if you've told somebody that last week you put a glass bottle in your non-recyclable waste.
And so the bad guys will resort to codes. Not the telegraphic codes which are information dense and look like GLOPT AYZNV but the steganographic types that look like normal conversation.
BTW, my next-door neighbour just got a new orange, male kitten. She calls him Biscuits because he has ginger nuts.
Gnome 3 and its mobile phone interface needs to be taken out behind the barn and shot. In the kneecaps.
No right-click. No middle-click. WTF? Maybe there's some chord I can play on the keyboard whilst clicking my name in Morse code on the left button of the mouse (the only one that seems to do anything) to achieve the same effect. I couldn't be arsed trying to find out, because there were more horrors waiting to ambush me as I tried to find out how to do anything useful at all (and failed). Installed Cinnamon (better, but with some of the same failings) and then Mate (much, much better, although still not quite as good as Gnome 2).
Oh yeah, after we've kneecapped Gnome 3 we need to do the same with its developers, then chop their hands off, to prevent them from fucking up anything else.
My argument against capital punishment is that the state couldn't properly arrange a piss-up in a brewery, so they can't be trusted to do it right.
One of my arguments too, after I've read about the number of botched executions in the US.
Another argument is the number of false convictions (particularly in the US) where decades later evidence surfaces to prove the convicted person is totally innocent. You cannot fully compensate somebody for spending a couple of decades in jail that s/he shouldn't have but you cannot compensate somebody you wrongly executed at all.
My main argument is that the death sentence is less of a deterrent than a life sentence for religious people. Statistics show that crime rates of all kinds are higher in countries (or US states) with high religiosity. My suspicion is that the religious see it as "If I kill him he'll end up in the appropriate place in the afterlife, and he'd have ended up in the same place eventually anyway so it doesn't really matter that I sent him off the pitch early. And anyway I can repent, say sorry to Jesus and go to heaven anyway." They don't seem so sanguine about it when they end up on death row, but as a deterrent it's less effective.
My number two argument is that I'm an atheist and think death is final. Even a few decades in prison is probably preferable to oblivion. Although I suspect a few encounters in a prison shower might change my mind on that.
I am sure the 'lack of oxygen' would be noticed by your body and appropriate 'actions' would be taken.
Nope. Not for most people. In most people the breathing reflex is triggered by build-up of carbon dioxide, not lack of oxygen. There are some medical conditions that can result in oxygen depletion being detected instead, but they take a long period of bodily adjustment (we're talking months, not minutes). Confirmation of this can be seen in simulations of aircraft decompression where people pass out without realizing there's anything wrong, particularly if the change in pressure is gradual rather than fast.
To quote text on 'Inert gas asphyxiation' :
Largely depends on the "inert" gas. Nitrogen and carbon dioxide, although it takes a lot to get them to react, do have nasty biological effects (with nitrogen you need a lot higher partial pressure than in the atmosphere, but then you get nitrogen narcosis). As do several other "inert" gases, including xenon. Xenon (despite being a noble gas) is, bizarrely, an anaesthetic (so a good choice for killing people painlessly).
Lack of oxygen alone isn't going to have any nasty side-effects. Unless, for example, you suffer from chronic respiratory acidosis, in which case your breathing reflex will be triggered by low oxygen rather than high CO2 and then you'll know there's something wrong.
I use GiffGaff. £10 credit lasts a couple of years. I rarely use either, so am happy with the service I receive.
Make sure you use it enough. There's usually a clause which says if you don't make a call from it for 6 months (or some other length of time, depending which bastards you use) then they deactivate your SIM. My terms of use say nothing about receiving calls, nothing about sending or receiving texts, it says you have to make at least one call every 6 months. Otherwise you lose any credit you had on it and you lose the number (which they re-use after a suitable period of time). Tesco did this with my backup phone, the one I keep in the house in case there's an emergency and there's a problem with my main phone.
I can understand this when the SIM really isn't being used because the phone got dropped where it couldn't be retrieved, or somebody decides he's getting too many unwanted calls so buys a new SIM and chucks the old one. Fairy nuff. But my backup phone was always on, and so presumably always registered to the network.
Does anyone with deep knowledge of how this stuff works know why they do it? Is it technically impossible for them to tell a particular SIM is registered to the network therefore is still in use even if it's not making or receiving calls? Or is it very hard to implement? Or is it feasible but would be expensive in terms of logging or whatever? Or did they not think about that use case? Or is it just because they're cunts? I had over a tenner on that phone (bought another top-up before the last one was even close to running out) and I'm still annoyed about it 3 years on.
I don't knock them for moving to a subscription model. Bug-fixes and, more importantly, security bug-fixes cost money. The old model of selling you an OS then using that revenue to fund bug-fixes led to OS "upgrades" every 3 years or so. With the possible exception of XP->Vista handling multiple cores better, 99% of the changes were cosmetic to make you think you were getting something new for your money. They had to sell you something because the money from the previous product was running out. XP was a bit of an outlier in terms of longevity because internet growth was fuelling PC sales for 10 years or so, that growth has slowed greatly as most of the population are online.
So I don't knock Microsoft for moving to a subscription model. In theory it would fund the continuing release of bug-fixes without having to release a "new" OS (things shuffled around, cosmetic changes, etc) every 3 years. What I do knock them for is that they're still shuffling things around and making annoying cosmetic changes even though they no longer have to. There's no excuse for that. "Buy Vista, it's new and improved and better than XP" made sense (even if it turned out to be false). "Continue to rent Windows 10, it's different from Windows 10" is bloody stupid.
What I also knock Microsoft for is that they're shite. They break as much stuff as they fix. A supposedly-unchanging OS ought only to improve over time (much as XP managed to) as they found and fixed more and more bugs. Instead they seem to be introducing new bugs as fast as they're fixing old ones.
Being DBA for what you develop feeds back into ensuring that what you develop is right and as a developer you understand what the database is doing.
Until this thread, it never occurred to me that the two would be separated to that extent (I've obviously led a sheltered life).
Fred Brooks had this to say:
Show me your flowcharts and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won’t usually need your flowcharts; they’ll be obvious.
Linus Torvalds had this to say
Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.
Yes, Linus was talking about data structures in the code itself, but anyone who thinks the principle doesn't extend to databases that are accessed by code is an idiot.
I've encountered enough problems when the devs did design the database (but didn't think things through). The idea of two different teams working on the code and the db with little communication between the teams gives me the heebie-jeebies.
The Dilbert Principle of Market Segmentation at work: first you sell to rich idiots, then you use the proceeds to ramp up the production to sell to poor idiots where the real volume is.
Dilbert may have codified the practise, but Sir Clive Sinclair pioneered it.
The time he failed was when he aimed for the low end at the start. The C5. Nobody rich would want one. Nobody poor would want one. Only the truly clueless would want one.
Fun coincidence: the C5 appeared not long after "Care in the Community" legislation when many clueless people were turned out onto the streets.
All he needs to know is how to hire "experts" and manage them. And how to toady up to the politicians. Oh, and how to take bungs without getting caught.
Which reminds me of a comment made by a real engineer during my early days.
Rolls Royce went bust the first time because it was run by engineers who didn't have a clue about management.
Rolls Royce went bust the second time because it was run by managers who didn't have a clue about engineering.
Obviously, such concerns only mattered in the private sector in the past. These days top management know to ensure they have a golden parachute before destroying the business by their ineptitude. In the civil service golden parachutes come as standard.
No bidding for unsustainable contracts ? At least somebody seems to have found a cluebat under the sofa ...
Yeah, my first thought was that bidding for contracts you know to be unsustainable is crazy. You might find yourself in a contract that you thought was going to be sustainable but turns out not to be, but bidding for one you know is going to be unsustainable is seriously insane.
Then I thought some more, and it does actually make sense (for small values of sense). If you have deep enough pockets (like Microsoft and Oracle) then going after unsustainable contracts can be a good long term strategy. Win enough of them and some of your competitors go under because they don't get any contracts at all, or get contracts by underbidding your underpriced bid. Once you have a monopoly on the market the sky is the limit.
Of course, it doesn't always work out that way, but some companies think it's worth a try.
No, this is just plain DNA sequencing data, which is strings of A, C, G and T.
Maybe they're storing them as actual strings. Not in ASCII. Not in UTF-8. But in UTF-32 (aka UCS-4). Four bytes per character.
You're about to retort that such an encoding would be incompetent. We're talking about the NHS here...
Isn't that a bit of a contradiction? If the base station either doesn't use or has batteries which aren't rechargeable, then the handsets won't continue to "work just fine" if the batts run out, will they?!
No contradiction at all.
The handsets work fine. Their display works. Their keypad works. Their RF section works. They work just fine. Without a working base station they're unusable (except as paperweights) but they do work.
I've upvoted you anyway for being a pedant. :)
Most people have cordless phones. How do they work in a blackout?
The handsets continue to work just fine, because they have rechargeable batteries in them,
The base stations, however, are a different matter. Most of them do not have rechargeable batteries in them.
The solution is to always have at least one standard phone. If you're sensible, you put phone sockets and a standard phone anywhere you have a handset charging station, because you never know where you'll be in an emergency (like a fire that incidentally happens to burn through the electrics and trip the breaker). Standard phones are cheap enough. You probably have the sockets already from back before you bought the cordless phones.
My view is that the reason you have a cordless phone is so you can wander from room to room as you talk (go to the kitchen for a snack, go back to the computer, have a piss, etc.) and you have an ordinary phone for when you've lost the cordless or in an emergency. YMMV.
@Gideon 1
Dunno why you got so many downvotes for what was an informative and correct answer.
For those who doubted you (and doubt me) I offer aintbigaintclever's video giving a walk-through of the kit installed at his house, battery back-up and all.
I also recommend his video on constructing a Penrose Triangle.
I didn't tear the page out, just went ex-directory.
Did you go NDQ as well? BT don't tell you that's an option and you have to specifically request it (and tell them you really, really mean it, you understand all the implications, and you still really, really, really mean it).
Hmmm, I googled for it (and alternative names it might have) and it seems to be completely absent as an option. Maybe they won't let you have it any more, or maybe they're being extra secretive. Not even mentioned in the option to pay them regular extra money so they phone the telephone preference service for you (once).
NDQ means (or meant) "no directory queries." Which means they won't tell anybody who phones directory enquiries and asks for your number (no point asking for NDQ unless you go ex-directory as well). It's worth asking, but be prepared to tell them that you really, really, really, really, really mean it.
Most commentards probably already know about this, but for the few that don't...
There was a fad on social media about "porn star names." It encouraged people to share their porn star name created from their first pet's name and mother's maiden name. Example: Fido Smith.
Two common security questions used to be first pet's name and mother's maiden name.
*sigh*
(2) it's for show, like a peacock's tail;
Possibly related to sexual selection. Perhaps embodying a little of Zahavi's Handicap Principal. Especially as humans (but not other apes) lack an os penis (a penis bone, also known as a baculum*). According to Zahavi's hypothesis, humans have to advertise their health by maintaining an erection without the benefit of a structural member.
Another hypothesis relates the size of the os penis to duration of intromission. For example, in chimps it is very small and their mating sessions typically last 7 seconds. So without a penis bone, human sex should last on the order of milliseconds. Hmmmmm. I'm sure I can do a little better than that.
*BTW, there is a Linux backlup solution called "Bacula." Which might be (I know very little Latin) the plural of baculum. The name was probably intended to resemble Dracula, but maybe...
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