Posts by Otto is a bear. 453 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Oct 2012
Seriously? The margins on this fizzy wine probably exceed Apple's my several orders of magnitude, not to mention that some labels are part of world wide drink and luxury goods conglomerates with very deep pockets. Pity the footballer who names his daughter Champagne.
BTW There are better fizzy wines out there, from France (Cremants), New Zealand and the UK. They have all one prizes to prove it.
More expensive TVs, more expensive cables, a chance for HiFi/TV nerds to look down on the rest of us who don't give a S*!t, which I'd bet is the vast majority of TV viewers. Ultimately this is about keeping the market moving and keeping a highly profitable non-commodity product segment going for a few more years.
Despite having HD and BluRay, I still watch normal channels and buy standard DVDs, mainly because HiRes does not add enough to my viewing experience. Apparently, also more of us are multi-tasking when watching TV, with one eye on The Register and one on the TV what use is any enhanced viewing mechanism?
I'll wait for true holographic 3D before I get excited.
BTW. The only £40 gold plated HDMI cable, I bought is the only one that's ever failed. (Need over Delivery time and cost)
Agree, with you both, the thing with endpoint devices is that you need to select the correct device for the job you want to do and when you want to do. If you do any substantial amount of authoring or data entry, an iPad is no good, a Laptop/PC, a desk and a big screen is what you want. If you go to a meeting an Note is brilliant, you can handwrite notes, lookup the web and so on, though a PC is still required for presentations.
The thing is, a dedicated device is always better at a task than a multipurpose device, a Nokia 6210 is a better phone than an iPhone, but an iPhone is more convenient, a big TV is better than a PC. A cased Windows PC is still, I think the best all round device you can buy, ok, it's not mobile, but. I think MS need to move it towards being a better, secure home server.
The other thing to consider is health & safety, in how we use our devices, wandering into the road texting, hunched over a laptop on the knee (Yup, me now), laptop shoulder, and so on.
We all have our favourite device and I'll bet it depends more on our lifestyle than anything else. The PC will be around for a long time to come, but perhaps not for everybody, remember if you want privacy, you don't store stuff in the cloud. For another OS to supplant Windows, you need to have a seamless upgrade between the two, not really the case.
Right, I think you are missing the word sensible there, when talking about lorry drivers. I live in a village with narrow roads and sharp turns, and still they try to come through.
Also delivery companies tend to use routing software that takes no account of the roads leading to a delivery, there's a road, we can send a 7.5 ton truck down it, and the drivers blindly follow the instructions, luckily our local authority is sensible and uses small service vehicles. I always tell them not to.
BTW GPS spoofing has been going on for years, in fact in the UK the MOD posts warnings in areas where they re doing it, so that the humble motorist won't be surprised to find their sat navs showing them the wrong location.
And long may the continue to do this. To be truly successful a criminal and his family must be invisible to society, luckily that's very difficult, as your family are just as likely to give you away accidentally as you are yourself. Just think of all the technological toys we now have that have GSM and GPS chips in them.
I don't know about commercial security companies finding back door exploits, but criminal hackers seem to be very good at finding them, and the back doors would need at the very least to have some kind of software and processing support to access a network, or load a trojan.
To actually report something back to whoever, would require the generation of network traffic, which would have to be dial home, no query mechanism would get through a properly setup network firewall.
Secure laptops tend to have encrypted disks, which de-encrypt at an OS level, so only the keyboard and display sub-systems would be vulnerable. An OS hack is fare more useful.
Once you start transmitting data via your back door, network security devices will notice it as it passes through a whole variety of checks. This would catch both Hardware and Software back doors. They only people really at risk are users who don't have defence in depth security, and probably not even that deep.
This story is a bit silly season though, isn't it, it's hardly a secret that secure organisations tend not to use much purely Chinese made kit, if they can help it. Any kit that is used, Chinese or not, has to pass a whole set of continuous tests to show that it isn't a threat. Funnily enough it was a Five eye ally who was first caught trying to do this to the DoD, and that was discovered by standard security processes at the supply level.
I believe non-diplomatic people travelling on Government business get Limited Diplomatic Immunity, they certainly do in the UK, and I'd guess it's the same for politicians. Perhaps Australia can let him win and ask for him to be given him that, then revoke it when he's on his way to Heathrow.
In exchange we'll let them win the ashes.
No a price to high I think.
The Patriot Act was a Republican initiative, and today there is a Democrat President, so is that a surprise.
Love the idea that the NSA would go round Washington threatening to expose past sins, do you have any evidence for that? Security services that meddle in politics in most western democracies don't fare too well in the long term, their whole reason for being is to protect democracy, not subvert it, and I don't think the NSA are that stupid. They might do it once, but politicians will always get them back by a thousand cuts. I also suspect the Secret Service and the FBI are the ones with the real dirt on politicians, and they will quietly tell the parties who is, and is not trustworthy when it comes to national security. I'd be very surprised if they shared that with the NSA. But hell, I'm a Brit, so what do I know.
That's a point, does anybody actually have fibre to their home? So really all these adverts about fibre are misleading, as it's really only to the exchange, or local distribution box, if you are really lucky.
Me, I won't touch any Murdoch products, and enjoy baiting the sky muggers in shopping centres, even 40% is too much for me.
I get 8Mbs from an overhead wire, but then the telephone exchange is at the end of my garden, so the BTWiFI is pretty good too. With no cable I doubt anyone could offer me a better service
Back in the day phones, by the third generation of mobiles, they were pretty tough, many early ones weren't, but then they were expensive. Certainly in the UK our usual mobile contracts tend to refresh the phone every 1 - 2 years, so there is no commercial need for anything to last for years, in fact one company has a contract designed to give you the latest phone.
Now I don't know what proportion of the market has this kind of contract, and what just uses their old phone on a sim only contract, but what's the incentive for builder to make tough phones.
BTW. I would think that the tensile properties of glass make it, even for gorilla glass, the bigger the sheet the easier it is to break, and is the glass still as thick as it was?
BTW, if you have an old smart phone, including early Motorola and Windows models that are wifi capable, there are new programs you can load to use them as remote controllers. I have one from Hornby on an old XDA and an old iPhone. Sheldon would approve.
I still have both my 6310i and the 6210, they both power on, don't know if they still connect as my sim doesn't fit them. Great phones, and indestructible. I used the 6310i as a router for my tom tom when I had my first iPhone because you couldn't do data without a data contract on an iPhone, but you could with the Nokia, without hacking it. The battery lasted a lot longer, and was compatible with loads of older models. So I always had at least 4 spare batteries.
The Muzzel velocity of a shotgun is around 1300 ft/sec or 395 m/sec, gravity is 9.8m/s/s, however air resistance is much more difficult to calculate, as it's variable.
You require a projectile velocity of between 140 & 200 ft/sec ( 42 & 61 m/sec) to break the skin.
The effective range of a shotgun, depending on shot type is 25 - 150 yards or 22.5 to 137 meters. The longest ranges are for single slugs.
So, I doubt you would get close to a drone, but you could severely piss off your neighbour's kid by shooting down his radio controlled aircraft.
BTW some drones look a whole lot like toy helicopters.
Fake chargers and such have appeared many times on TV consumer programs in the UK. Notably one showed the store room of a phone shop stuffed full of counterfeit accessories electrical and otherwise.
I'll bet that consumer programmes informing the Chinese public of poor or dangerous goods just don't exist.
Not being a Merkin, and quite thankful they are not still a colony, I'm not sure that the 4th amendment really applies. Hacking into their home computer, yes, but monitoring transmissions across the public internet. How is this different, other than in scale, than informants or undercover people listening to conversations in public places.
It could be argued that eMail is the same as Post, but equally it could be argued that it's often a conversation carried out in a public place.
It's also true that the NSA, CESG, and all the rest might well collect data, but they do not read it all, by any means. They really don't care what you look at, unless it's very illegal, in which case they will get a warrant and really look at everything you do. I'd still love to know how else you would expect security services to gather intelligence and enforce the law in an electronic world.
If you don't want you eMail or data read, then don't use the internet. Store all your stuff locally and don't use internet based backup and file store services, do it yourself. A third party company is not the same as your home, and will do what is best for it's shareholders not you, which means they'll let security services look at most anything they ask for without warrant, on the verbal assurance of an officer.
If you must use the internet then always be careful about what you say, remember libel applies to social media and messaging.
The same can also be said for some parts of the USA, the South Western states are water poor and rely on the Colorado river, which is practically dry when it gets to the Sea of Cortez.
The growth in population and agriculture depending of Lakes Powell and Mead is approaching the limit, and there is already some talk of piping water in from the north and Canada.
Some Canadians reckon that the US won't want to pay Canada for that, and will annex it later this century. I suspect the Merkins will get a big a surprise if they do. Canada is a bit bigger than the USA, with 10% of the population, the bush war that would follow would be fun, at least for the Canadians.
Where as what has actually happened is that more business has gone to the bigger suppliers with wider contracts that only the big suppliers can underwrite. The logic being that a single supplier can recognise economies of scale, the reality is that you have a lead and a load of screwed to the ground sub-contractors.
Most contracts are prepared by a limited number of law firms advised by IT consultancies, quite often the likes of PI and Deloitte.
Often, and I say this as a bidding veteran, we will come up with questions they can't answer, or costs they can't accept, and the other bidders usually have the same questions and cost scales. Thus the government has to go away and think about it. Elections and new ministers also delay things, and in the past this has lead small businesses to fail while they wait for an incoming minister to say yes, no or start again.
In general all IT suppliers are treated poorly by government, and the government gets what it pays for, luckily on a day to day basis the civil servants and IT supplier staff have a good relationship and do their level best to make it all work. TUPE means that it's usually all the same people delivering the service over the long term, regardless of the stitching on the polo shirt. It's only the management that changes.
It means cheaper train tickets, I doubt many people will care that much, and that's how it will be sold.
I did say if.
As quite a lot of our rail network is run by DB, the german state railway company, through Chiltern and Arriva, I'd expect it to arrive here quite quickly, and that the operators will trouser the revenue with no benefit to the customer.
But all I can think of is why do I want Windows 8.anything, what does it give me that XP, hell even 95 did.
On the surface nothing, I can think of. Lots of technical stuff underneath, but day to day? I seem to remember that you have pretty much always been able to have touch screen apps with Windows, if not MSDos.
It's the pretty UI really isn't? I'll get my chequebook.
In order that our security services carry out their functions they need to monitor internet traffic to spot useful information about what the bad guys are up to. A tiny fraction of the data is relevant to them, a fraction of that is actually detectable, but once detected it may take years to build a picture activity, much of which will come from previously discarded data. If they were to throw away the data on first pass then a lot would be missed.
The rest of the data is never even looked at by a human, and will sit there until deleted, no democratic country can afford to read everybody's eMail, either financially or politically.
Governments have always taken an interest in anybody who is a criminal, an agent of a foreign power, and of groups of individuals who protest or work against the state. They also look at our elected politicians, and business leaders. This is all done to protect the state and its citizens, and they do it proactively because we the people prefer bad guys to be caught before they do any damage, and I'm not sure how you expect them to do it without touching the lives of the innocent. There is a balance between civil rights and security, is shifts each time the mark is overstepped by the security service, or the bad guys, but it will never ever stop happening, nor should it. Snowdon has broken a service oath, to basically stand up and say hay the NSA spies on the world, and so does GCHQ, which is not news, but the details given are another matter.
I'd love to hear how you think it should be done, if not the way it is.
For those of you who don't follow the news, there are things called Dark Nets which are very difficult to detect unless you trawl a lot of messages, these nets are what criminals use. Do you think that these networks don't have access to bright people who do their best to keep the nets from being found and hacked.
Dark Nets are by their very nature transient, and difficult to find, unless you know where to look, they don't advertise themselves on normal DNS services, they don't have fixed IPs, they aren't there 24/7.
Now what would you expect to happen if one such net was found? I somehow don't think you would read about it in the Grauniad.
What exactly do you expect your intelligence and law enforcement agencies to do with the Internet and any communications medium?
I expect them to monitor chatter looking for interesting key words and then apply for a warrant to then read such interesting data, and find out 99%, probably, that it isn't.
For that 99% I expect them to treat it as confidential information, and forget it, which they do.
For the 1% I expect them to act.
And in fact that's what I expect them to do for everything, and that's what they always have done.
What do you expect them to do, how else do you expect them to do it? Even if you have a warrant for a specific person, you still have to find that person's traffic, and how do you issue a warrant for an unknown group, if you you can't monitor chatter to find them.
Everything that is in the PNC is also in local police systems, indeed that is true of all national systems. It has always been the case that the police keep records of what may be hearsay, gossip or rumour, it's called intelligence and come from their sources. This is how ultimately they can stop some crimes before they happen and catch criminals at a later date, because they have the pieces of the jigsaw thy need.
Some criminals take a very long time to catch, more than 10 years, and it only happens because of the intelligence they have gathered.
The police have always graded information according to the source, and the "truth" of that information can change based on corroborating or conflicting information.
Perhaps some of the commentators here might like to suggest how they would gather and use information. The fact that police systems hold details of arrests that don't lead to prosecution, of people who should never have been arrested is the fault of our politicians, not the police, and is in a large part down to the hysteria surrounding Bishard. It is also in part procedural, and down to the admissibility of statements made by suspects under arrest or caution. How do you stop Ian Huntly, and alike, this is what changed the law, and its all to satisfy the tabloids and protect children. How could you object to that?
BTW - I think that the police habit of arresting at the drop of a hat is wrong and lazy.
That always assumes there's no shortage of rented property even then. What you might see, at least for a while is buy to let properties being left empty, because to take a cut in rental will devalue the the capital value of the property, and perhaps put it into negative equity and forcing a distressed sale. Enough of these would force a property price collapse with even more dire consequences for our economy, yes first time buyers might get a bit of a lift, if they can get the lower mortgage from against yet another round of lender bad debts.
The fault being that buy to let and indeed the high street has always assumed that rents will only ever go up, downward rents are bad news to most landlords who tend to be highly leveraged. It's not right but, it's how it is. How long do you want the economy to be depressed?
Oh and good on you Computacentre, that's the way to do it, won't affect my buying decisions one bit so you'll still get a lot of business from my end. I don't thick all squatters or the homeless are scum, very few are, but it isn't up to commercial organisations to solve homelessness, that's the government and local authorities.
The other way round for me, my ex gave me The Wasp Factory to read when she saw my stack of his SF works. Since then I've read alms all his other books, and enjoyed them all. She could never get her head round SF and Fantasy, but I got some cracking good non-sf reads out of it.
Good Bye Iain.
You don't see a lot of his books on the shelves, outside Masters of SF, and lets face it you certainly won't find him on-line unless you know who he is. His books were easy to find in the 70s and 80s in any good book shop, no matter how poor the SF section was. But other new author have come along to out sell and replace him in all but specialist stores. It's interesting, that although I'm an SF addict, a lot of older authors never appear in my recommendations in Amazon, despite their popularity, and the fact Amazon doesn't know I have them.
Jack wrote good stories that were easy to read, well put together. They aren't in the modern seemingly preferred style of several different stories all woven together, like Hamilton or Martin.
I miss his books. RIP Jack
It's a command culture, a Police officer will swear yellow is green it told to by a senior officer, even if it flies in the face of common sense. Policy is policy, the police are not the only organisations that suffer from this blindness, and no policeman is an expert in everything.
I live near an auto plant, and a friend bought their latest desirable top spec sports model. Within a week it was stolen from his drive. The police told him that, that make's the worst to have round here, the local car thieves knew how to steal them before they came off the production line.
Bring back crook locks and garages with big bolts on the inside.
I don't think that's a problem restricted to Android users, you should see the S$5t the family yoof download onto just about every device they own and then ask me to fix when it all goes horribly wrong. They really get upset when I wipe the device and reload from scratch and ask for the backup, tease that I am.
Let's face it, if you are a mobile worker for an IT company, you would rather buy your own kit. Company provided IT gear tends to be lowest common denominator, ie the manager wot does a bit of eMail capable. All of my technical colleagues have their own high powered laptops that are properly protected, tuned and maintained. They all tend to be less than three years old. This compares to the company supplied IT which is low power, and up to five years old. Project kit is up to it, but is not available to everybody on demand.
My personal IT is far more capable than the companies, so I use it when it's advantageous and does not break security rules. In fact I do all my VM and Database prototyping and pre-sales on my kit and only upload the results.
Oh, and as far as what happens when someone leaves, well I suspect it's no different to the corporate only model. People tend to copy useful day to day eMails, utilities and so on, to their own backup devices anyway. BTW on our secure devices this is not possible.
promoting a positive image, say we're shit and people will think any small improvement is an advance. In actual fact this statement is just wrong, but one wonders how many other rail networks the CIO has actually used, including our own. Try VIA, AMTRAK, SNCF off TGV and countless others, we have probably the most intensive rail network in the world. It is a very complex system.
The blame is passed around because, stupidly, we make the cause of delay pay and for a single train failure this can run into tens even hundreds of thousands of pounds in compensation to other train operators and passengers, and where does this money come from.......ooooooh higher ticket prices. Shame we can't claim of the insurance of drivers who clog the motorways breaking down and having accidents.
Theses five won't be writing train or signalling software, only back office stuff. The actual software used for the track and trains is written by specialists in those areas, usually the builders.
It's highly complex, safety critical and yes takes a long time to develop and get right, the railway is a hostile EMF environment against which train and signalling systems have to operate and be compatible with systems up to 50 years old, not something most SI's can cope with unless they have specialist divisions.
Sadly looks like mine lost out.
It killed Borders everywhere, 2009 in the UK, we still have Waterstones left nationally, but they are contracting. Trouble is, it' difficult to lay all the blame at Amazon, the big market chains here as in the US sell best selling music, games and books at discount prices the specialist retailers can't truly match.
I suspect we'll reach an equilibrium with mainly small specialist chains and independents, and e-retailers.
Amazon is however no substitute for a good book shop or music store where you can actually browse far faster than on-line, admittedly you have to go there, and it does involve fresh air.
Um, think you'll find that there are milling machines that you can plug into a USB port as well, and for a similar cost, I'd be surprised if some highly responsible and socially aware US arms manufacturer hadn't already made the control files available on the internet.
BTW - If a plastic pistol is likely to shatter the first time you fire it, wouldn't the designers and distributers of the print files be really, really exposed to all kinds of law suits to those dumb enough to trust a download file to make a gun. I would guess that the print process would take at least 50 hours in total, and who knows what glitches might happen. After all what could possibly go wrong with the build quality, answers on a postcard to Cody I think. I'd love to see the disclaimers.
I'm a voracious reader, and I sometimes run out of books I want to read, ebooks have provided a cheap way to read either crap, or sample a new author without the need to buy a book. It's also useful when going on holiday, or into hospital, I can easily take 4 or 5 books with me in a small package.
However, I prefer to read and own a paper book, a room packed with books is partial heaven for me. As to the cost of eBooks, I think they are about right. I noticed that no one mentioned the royalty paid to the author in the list of costs, how much is that?
I hope the future is plural, there is space for both paper and e, but perhaps only the very best sellers will land up in print, for collectors only, which would be a shame.
To a great extent we, the users of computer systems are the biggest culprits of this or that company becoming dominant. We choose this or that product because it's better marketed and cheaper, and lo and behold they get better revenues, invest more in their product, give better dividends, that attracts more investment, and so on.
We have the IT landscape we chose, even if we didn't really want it, IT has since the 1990s had a "Me too" culture where the dominant players keep becoming more dominant because they are successful and the risk of doing different is too great for individuals or companies who don't want to be landed with expensive junk, be it software, hardware or service.
MS and Intel are being challenged not in their core market, but by a complete shift in the market driven by mobile devices, any bets that this won't be dominated by a single very large player in a few years, even if a lot is open source.
Actually a lot of us are very competent and know exactly what we are doing, but didn't you know IT professionals are a commodity procurement item whose cost needs to be forced down. Experience no longer has value. You put some good people on to start with and then replace them with cheaper in-experianced staff who bring in a higher margin. The customer thinks they are getting a good deal on rates, but actually they aren't. Age and experience no longer meet client price points, so the quality and experience is now going to get a whole lot worse.
Oh how I wish it was. Well maybe not, but even for the big boys it's mind bogglingly arcane, and certainly not fixed. We have no ex MPs advising us, not sure any IT companies do. We do have the services of small consultancies made up of ex-first devision civil servants, but then so do all IT companies.
This kind of comment is pointless, its patently not true, do you really think us big boys know the results of bids before we start, we don't, we spend hundreds of thousands of pounds chasing large contracts with about a 1 in 4 chance of winning those we go for, if we know we won't win it in advance, nor would we if we knew we would win it. The point of the procurement process is firstly to prove you can deliver it, oh by the way, by the time procurement ends, the business requirement has usually changed, so you never actually supply what the contract asked for.
Yes, you are right, investing in people who know how to ask the right questions. However you might be under the mistaken impression that Police forces can do this, some government Agencies do this, but mostly they prefer feeling collars. Using open source is however more difficult, it requires a level of expertise and commitment that just does not exist in this market. Some of the background papers issued by the home office indicate that forces should use specialist companies to do this, rather than waste warranted officer time.
This is where the problem lies, budget cuts mean that to spend money on IT and data analysis, then you have to invest in Analysts, which means conversion of warranted officers into analysts, you can't make them redundant and employ cheaper "civilian" staff. Trouble is you have to have the right type of person to do this, the IT industry is packed with them, which makes you wonder why they think they would be cheap. Recruit a bunch of graduates at 24K a year, train them in evidential data management, no mean feat, and then they become just as expensive as they become more experience. The social analysis skills required to do this exist already in Experian and alike, and they are sniffing around the Police as well to take on this market. Nothing open source about Experian.
It still does Holmes II and last Holmes III is sort of bobbing around procurement.
IBM has a tool called Initiate which has been trialled in a number of Police forces and national systems, but wider adoption of any tool is hindered by a confusing approach to IT across the forces and home office, and indeed they way it's all funded. Big systems like the PND have huge scope for development, but it's more likely that new systems will be developed at twice the cost than to invest in someone else's legacy project, as was noted for GMP. PND expanded to Police funding is now very tight and big sales are unlikely in the short term unless they can be justified as Spend to Save, but IT is to most CC's a low priority compared to officer numbers.
I2 is used by practically every force in the UK, mainly for social network analysis and court presentation.
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