Posts by Nick Kew 2841 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jan 2007
Is this going to be our big connection to the outside world?
From an area where road connections are ghastly and the railway is a sick joke even when it isn't getting washed out to sea. Millions for this, but they won't pay a few quid re-open our inland railway line west of Exeter.
Reminds me of the beginning of the century, when they dug up our roads to lay transatlantic cable, yet we couldn't get ADSL ourselves.
Aha, there was me wondering why this story seemed to have gone quiet.
Not sure how relevant any of this is, but some of the story rings sadly true. My own experience of working in the UK IT industry (not Autonomy) has been of some very bad and unpleasant management. The US companies I've worked for (not HP - but including one US company that is owned by a UK company) have been much better. If Lynch was typical of UK management then the remarks about him being impossible ring rather true.
Not that any of that affects the figures available to HP when they overpaid (or to Oracle when they called it absurdly overpriced at half what HP paid).
So who gets queen.uk? Someone looking to use names like drag.queen.uk?
More seriously, isn't this likely to lead to confusion, and opportunities for fraud? In the past when I see names like gov.uk and nhs.uk, I can be reasonably sure of who they are. That's going to become blurred when you start getting phishing from hmrc.uk.
Glad to see you mention metrics. Measuring performance in any complex AI task is something of a challenge, and one that tends to come with a powerful SEP field that means those few in the research community who notice there's an issue are far too maverick to get funding.
Many years ago I did postdoc research in the complex AI task of computer speech recognition. I was one of the few who looked at how we and every other research team were measuring (and publishing) performance, and our hopelessly meaningless use of concepts like "accuracy", and tried to suggest more meaningful metrics. The basic SEP everyone ignored was that a system that could perform an easy task (like distinguishing digits 'zero' to 'nine'[1]) with a very mediocre 95% accuracy was rated better than one that achieved, say, 75% in a more challenging task like transcribing natural language dictation[1], let alone a stunningly impressive 25% in following threads in a cocktail party[1].
Lesson: take all reports of how such systems perform with more than a pinch of salt. Ideas like "percent accurate" need more context than you'll ever get to become meaningful.
[1] These tasks are not really representative of what I'm talking about, but to go into detail would be serious levels of TMI. I guess that's a variant of the same problem the journos face when reporting on facial recognition.
Wrong target. A loan might be exactly what a company needs, and the interest rate has to reflect risk.
Why would KCOM take out a loan? Because it needs capital for something: for example infrastructure investment. And because there's a perverse incentive against the alternative of equity investment, in that a loan gets more favourable tax treatment (interest is paid out of untaxed income; dividends out of taxed income). If you dislike corporate loans, lobby for those to be aligned!
HMG - in the person of Michael Gove - firmly ruled out a trade deal with the US.
That is to say, in the early morning of Jan. 5th this year (while attending a farmers' conference in his capacity as DEFRA minister), he absolutely ruled out dropping food production and safety standards or accepting imports produced to lower standards (a race to the bottom that would of course totally undermine UK farmers). Since that is the US red line that has prevented a US-EU trade deal (and that presents the biggest brexit problem over the Northern Ireland border), we won't be accepting a trade deal.
Not that those in his party who reject the "backstop" will accept any of that. I expect Gove would've been firmly reprimanded for his clarity if the PM or the ERG or one or two others had the mental capacity to see it.
I expect they'll continue to equivocate on Huawei (I wonder if anyone has the guts to say put up or shut up)? And aren't even some of the mainstream press starting to notice the glaring nonsense in the orange Tantrump?
Sweden presumably would rather not touch this hot potato. The prosecutor is doing her job in pursuing him, but the court doesn't fancy the prospect of having to deal with the US requests.
As I said here already, if Sweden doesn't ask for him, we should just deport him to Botany Bay. I have no wish to support him, but if if we send him to the US he becomes a political prisoner and I'll reluctantly have to do so.
Reg needs an icon for holding my nose!
Require plugins to be individually signed? Again, with a whitelist for trusted legacy stuff.
Unsigned plugins are unsigned executables, and as soon as you allow them on a system, all bets are off. Hence sandboxing to limit what an untrusted program can do. In Apple's case, I'd be inclined to worry about them getting over-zealous, and limiting my ability to breach my own sandbox. I already have to jump through hoops to compile and run "HelloWorld" with gcc on Mac.
<Advocatus Diabolus>
In principle, there could be a matter of user choice here. Let the law not dictate how ISPs behave, but merely force them to advertise clearly their privacy policy (or lack thereof). Then users get to choose an ISP that respects privacy if they care about it.
Would that principle of informed consent not be more honest than letting users here sign up for the likes of Virgin without any warning of what they're letting themselves in for?
Shareholders suing their own company need an objective. Financial compensation as such is self-defeating[1]: they'd be paying their own compensation. Has someone applied to the Court to order Facebook to do something - like change its management structure / give them a board seat?
[1] Unless there's some diabolical tax wheeze. Or - worse - fund managers joining lawyers in deliberately taking fees at the expense of their own investors.
The IEEE has long been accepted by the international community. Being subject to US law only becomes a problem when US law is abused. But the more that happens, the more the world will have to look elsewhere.
Not that it's actually US law as in "rule of law". Tantrump set that aside with the magic invocation "national emergency".
Of course it is. That's why anyone who's remotely serious about distributing executable contents will PGP-sign their packages.
I take it the time you refer to was a more innocent era. Not this century.
And of course, you can't entirely protect dumb users from counterfeits!
There are very good reasons to rewrite content in transit. Examples range from the classic case where content contains internal links that won't resolve for external readers, those need to be resolved at a gateway, through to services like accessibility enhancement for blind readers, or translation. Not to mention all kinds of content syndication frameworks.
There are times when security concerns trump the usefulness of such things. But if reading El Reg really needed us to know the origin of the contents, we wouldn't have Anonymous Cowards.
Don't most servers still have a /dev/audio device?
I'd've thought a sufficiently distinctive sound might've made the server easier to find:
while [1] do;
cat dance-of-the-cuckoos.wav >> /dev/audio
done
Something (with a suitable audio track as suggested) to replicate for $boss.
Of course, once you've introduced a backdoor, you need to nudge a bunch of recalcitrant targets into using it. Show them how dangerous their old tools were, and how critical it is they upgrade.
Once there was a lot of resistance to a dangerous new import, and calls to ban coffee. That was when coffee houses were places where dangerous radicals might communicate subversive ideas.
Hmmm. Come to think of it, there's even a nominal precedent, in the connection of Bach's coffee cantata to Zimmermann's coffee house.
Not arguing with that.
But big shareholders can sometimes exert genuine influence - for reasons ranging from entirely ethical to entirely selfish, but more usually just because they believe the company can be better-run to everyone's benefit. That's what's customarily called an activist investor.
If you buy one share just so you can heckle the AGM, that's just the peanut gallery. Though even the peanut gallery might make its mark.
You speak of "activist shareholders", but you omit to tell us. Are you using the normal meaning of the term - serious shareholders with clout seeking to push through change? Or is it someone who's bought a handful of shares just to pull a stunt without having a real stake?
Would be interesting to hear if any of the fund managers who manage parts of one's own portfolio was taking an activist role.
They are a very long term problem (how many millions of years was the Carboniferous era that laid down most of those deposits and terraformed Earth to a planet that could eventually support evolution of the first mammals)? As good as permanent as far as those life-forms that don't survive the reverse terraforming are concerned.
As for nature's cleanup, that would be something that photosynthesises rapidly and aggressively. An ocean-wide algal bloom might accelerate healing, but would be Very Bad News for many (most?) of today's life forms.
Plastic water bottles are a Good Thing.
I always keep a couple of them around the place. Then I can fill one to take with me when I go out for long enough to get thirsty. Or just fill with water and put in fridge, with a hint of extra flavour like mint or lemongrass.
As for plastic waste, yes it's a problem. But not a permanent problem in the sense of CO2 emissions. Plastic is organic and energy-rich. There's an ecological niche for things that can digest it. Nature abhors a vacuum, and something is sure to evolve to fill it. Though what might happen in the meantime isn't nice.
Brands are funny things.
Often a brand can be owned by more than one company, by contract with their original owners or successors. For example, last time I looked, Cadburys drinking chocolate was made and marketed by an entirely different company to any of the solid products.
Whose law?
Trump's law (using "national emergency" to override his own country's rule of law) governs a contract between on the one hand a Japanese-owned British company, and on the other hand a Chinese company.
No wonder Trump vetoed WTO continuation!
Huawei holds various ARM licences. I expect the contract says they have rights that can't be unilaterally withdrawn, and that they pay ongoing royalties for those.
Arm harm could go a lot further than Huawei. Today's news is the first to make me really glad I no longer hold ARM shares (which I was sorry to part with despite the profit I made when Softbank bought them).
ARM's whole ecosystem (like Android's) only works if participants are treated fairly. This could provide an impetus for an industry-wide effort to develop a real alternative to ARM (perhaps even more so when you add Qualcomm's aggressive behaviour within the ecosystem). By analogy, imagine the impetus Linux might've got if, twenty years ago, Microsoft had suddenly withheld cooperation from Dell or Compaq shipping Windows.
Interesting repercussions there, too.
The cost of that 3G spectrum was a whopping loss for the telcos, so they carried it forward and offset it against tax liabilities in subsequent years. Result: the telco whose tax affairs are most visible - on account of them being domiciled in Blighty - ended up with a reputation for paying no tax, and a target for protest.
I've been more than 20 years with my mobile phone provider. That's because they've always treated me fairly and given me no cause to walk away, so why take on the hassle, and expose myself to the risk of finding myself in a much worse situation?
But if they ever illegally charged me £220 extra, I know I have a range of other options. Whereas Ofcom has monopoly powers against them. Spot the difference?
Indeedie. An ecosystem like Android only works if participants can rely on being treated fairly.
Perhaps the best thing Google can do now is to hand over a lot more Android to an Open Source foundation independent of Google itself. Sufficient to run a tablet or phone without the need to enter a business relationship with a US corporation. So a vendor like Huawei (or Samsung, or Motorola, or ...) becomes to Android as a distro is to core Linux.
That is, if such a move isn't itself sanction-busting in the crazy world of today.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
