Posts by Nick Kew 2841 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jan 2007
Telephone companies traditionally stated that they employed women telephone operators because their voices were clearer on the line.
That's entirely compatible with the report.
If female *voices* sound more alike than male ones, that would tend to make their *words* easier to follow in adverse circumstances like a noisy/low-bandwidth line.
Can't believe noone here has consigned him to the Clacks yet ...
To think, many years ago as a young student in the neighbouring Pure Maths department, I would semi-regularly encounter him in the wheelchair with his helpers, without really knowing who he was. My occasional forays into DAMPT[1] revealed a singularity in the building, that may have been his field.
[1] Department of Applied Maths and Theoretical Physics.
I shall leave you with this question: if you were placed in the same situation, and had the presence of mind that always comes with hindsight, could you have got out of it in a simpler or easier way?
Yes. Take up a new career writing IT suspense stories. That one looks massively TL;DR, but had me gripped!
The transatlantic cables bring no benefit locally. It's not like, say, a Nigerian oil pipeline we can tap in to and help ourselves. It's just disruption when they dig up the roads.
Special funding for rural broadband is an altogether different question.
I'm sure your tongue was in your cheek there, but it brought back memories of the time when both my on-road routes to work (about six miles at the time) were dug up.
Would we also have a case like with the aviation industry where a fault can lead to the grounding of all similar planes until the problem is fixed?
Striking a balance between that and a regular product recall is presumably the kind of thing on the current agenda.
Representing herself could simply be all she could afford. That's not unusual, and the hot air we occasionally get about "equality of arms" when a highly-trained barrister faces some poor sod who has no choice is meaningless.
Though come to think of it, scrub that. She did have a choice - just put Intel behind her and get on with life. Not a victim after all.
In September 2011 it was a US satellite coming down, and I blogged about it:
"A NASA satellite is crashing to earth, out of control. Noone knows where it will land, but the chattering classes have been speculating on the risk of humans getting hit by it.
I just heard Prof. David Spiegelhalter on the wireless telling us the risk of getting hit was similar to the chance of 44 consecutive Heads on tossing a fair coin.
The Stoppard fans among us know that 44 times is nothing. Do we need to resort to an Infinite Improbability Drive?"
Very cheap, yes. But surely subject to the same security concerns as a software update: an imposter could brew up a ROM containing malware, at a cost that's a drop in the ocean compared to a home or car system. Security again boils down to a cryptographic chain of trust.
How do SIM cards authenticate? That looks like a framework for pushing out a handshake. Having a SIM card manage security of signed updates, whether of hardware or software, should surely be feasible.
Not sure that's entirely new: rather it's a new face on a well-known issue. We've seen it online where a domain changes hands from someone trusted (and linked from respected sources) to someone evil. Not a private key, but a level of trust that might count for just as much.
The more interesting question is, who is thinking about it? You can mitigate: for example, IoT company's insurers to hold keys and revocation certificates in escrow, but who will make that a code of practice?
I remember a lady programmer telling me about how she had to fix the walks of a game's female characters, because the blokes had no idea the hips worked differently.
Was she really a programmer? Sounds more like a visual/arty kind of person. Yeah, OK, she could be someone who wears more than one hat, but really! How many programmers do you suppose give a d*** about the accurate depiction of the gait of cartoon characters in a game?
OK, I expect having someone with her eye for detail probably improved the eventual game. Diversity of talents is good, though totally different from "diversity" imposed for SJW reasons.
To respect your wishes I'll address you as "Dear Anonymous Coward".
Thank you, but there was absolutely no need for that. The reason for anonymity was that, in my judgement, it seemed entirely appropriate to what I was writing that you should read it "blind". If you read it before googling for the origin then my anonymity served it's purpose. If not ... well, there's no compulsion to play along.
And yes, I was aware as I wrote that a reader could probably identify me (only probably, because I couldn't be arsed to verify it for myself). After all, I even mentioned the possibility of googling me in the text!
I always find it amusing that (typically) conservative white males leap to the assumption that the women and under-represented recruits are "token", "mediocre", or somehow less-than them.
I always find it amusing that (typically) white male SJWs jump to utterly unjustified conclusions about what other people think. If I were to say "my application failed because the quota was already filled", I'm not saying I'm better than a black female candidate who got the job. Merely that our respective merits were never considered, and no-one has made a judgement either way.
She may very well be better than me (we'll never know), but even so she wasn't recruited on merit. And that should bother her too, if she has self-respect.
Exactly as is alleged to be happening at Google.
ObDisclaimer: I've never applied to work at Google, though I've had my share of spam from their recruiters. In common with, I suspect, most Reg commentards.
I've been trying to sell a TV series based on the BOFH for ages now - after getting the OK from Simon to draw on his stuff, I completed seven scripts and tried to get production companies interested
Ooh! Good luck with that. I wonder what level of cliqueiness you're up against with the production companies that have the ear of telly commissioners?
For me to make suggestions is probably a case of teaching granny to suck eggs, but ... have you tried thinking through your customer's mindset? For example, making Simon's alter ego a female would tick a huge box with the BBC in terms of representing women in central roles, without seriously impacting on the story lines. Just wondering!
Taking discussion from the abstract to the specific and well-known, how fine-grained should censorship be?
Should the entire Bible be banned, or only those extensive passages that explicitly glorify acts of terror, genocide, and war?
And what about works derived from the Bible's terror content? Like the Dixit Dominus, the slaughter to put the greatest 20th century monsters in the shade? Or the story of Elijah - the great role model for Bin Laden? Or small-scale terrorist acts like the suicide bomber Samson?
Humans in particularly sensitive activities[1] have long operated on a need-to-know basis.
Occasionally we hear of a dog or other animal being killed because it knows too much and would reveal something to an enemy.
If the "I" in AI is to mean anything, we're into the same situation.
[1] Including some that are sensitive only because the glare of publicity would reveal monumental waste of taxpayer funds, and such things.
Virgin speeds as in this speed, or maybe this ?
I wouldn't mind slow speeds so much if only the buggers could be contacted to fix it when they grind to a halt altogether! A much higher priority for Ofcom should be to insist on a functioning customer service!
There seems to be a missing element to this story.
Did the telcos (all of them?) just roll over and provide data on request? Or did they at least insist on some form of Due Process? Wouldn't the latter in itself create a documented evidence trail (at least in theory)?
And did all our telcos behave exactly the same? Or is the story glossing over something, or perhaps generalising from a single GCHQ-telco relationship?
In the case of the Swansea Lagoon, the environmental effects have been studied probably more extensively than any other proposed project, and found to be extremely benign compared to other human things. Like houses or cars, let alone power stations.
One of the followup projects planned by the Swansea folks - building on the Swansea experience - is a bigger lagoon at Bridgewater, that'll not only generate power, but also help protect against flooding. If you believe the Somerset Levels are land - and value peoples houses, businesses, farms, and some of our best cheeses - that sounds like a positive benefit.
London's postal vans want a depot somewhere out Essex way, with some local tidal capacity. It won't be as much as in the Bristol Channel, but those Thames Estuary and North Sea tidal flows are still strong enough to be clearly visible from space.
Oh yes please. Alert the emergency services when I'm on forever-hold trying to call someone's customer services modelled on Kafka's castle. Preferably before rather than after the rising blood pressure leads to a fatal heart attack.
Better still, as soon as the "on hold" becomes a yob screaming too aggressively.
Indeed. The article talks of "the programmers". Given that the word programmer commonly applies to some of the most junior folks in the $bigco, and that they may have little freedom to Get It Right, I can see two interpretations that work:
(1) They mean holding the developer corporately liable.
(2) They're already anticipating an exercise scapegoating the innocent.
Why not talk about the the interesting questions, like responsibility for software components (libraries, etc), and the distinction between proprietary and open-source?
Actually, having now taken a look at Damore's legal complaint[1], Chevalier doesn't appear particularly unpleasant/abusive. He's one voice among many, and by no means at the extreme.
What he (or indeed Damore) may have done elsewhere is a whole nother question.
[1] It starts well, but also seems to indulge in manufactured outrage that looks a lot like what the SJWs themselves go in for.
Interesting comments. Perhaps some journalist might investigate the reality of it.
'Cos if this turns out to be what he's really like, one could be tempted to speculate on whether and why we're being prompted to compare a man who politely expressed an opinion (albeit a dissident opinion) with an utter s**t.
The fact, as I see it,
Erm .....
is that the difference between male and female brains is not significant,
Evidence? Or is that pure blind prejudice?
(Note, I'm not saying you're wrong. I retain an open mind on the evidence of differences).
and that there is a wider range of difference within male brains or female brains han between male and female.
That at least is uncontroversial, though it's often presented as a red herring in arguments, as if it negates actual differences.
Noone should be dismissed just for having views. One hopes there's more to justify it both these cases than has been revealed in these columns.
In the Damore case, quite a lot is known, including what he actually wrote. In this case, less is known, leaving open (on simple Bayesian principles) a higher likelihood that his dismissal was indeed merited.
in Notepad (or whatever the equivalent was in 1992)
There were vi clones around at the time.
I recollect one called pcz that did a decent job on smallish text files, but was completely unable to load anything big. Never investigated, but I suspect there was a 16-bit size somewhere in there.
Or maybe that was another vi clone, and pcz was better than that. Damn, no memory for that kind of detail.
A quick google finds a not-too-outdated estimate that there are 5.2 million businesses in the UK. If we take the article at face value, that would suggest losses of 5.2m * 500k, or 2.6 billion. That being, good British billions, not those US imposters: in US numbers it's 2600 billion. Which is something round about our entire GDP.
Hmmm. Something pretty fundamental is missing - like telling us what they're actually talking about.
I gently explained the idea that a definition of professional is 'paid to do something' and that the opposite is 'amateur' - does something for fun without pay.
Good for you.
You evidently didn't graduate into a big recession. That's one life-circumstance that's out of our individual control. Studies have shown that the self-confidence (or otherwise) that comes from graduating into a good or a difficult jobs market stays with most of us throughout working life. The term "lost generation" is sometimes applied to cohorts who graduated at the wrong time, while your lot thrive.
Kudos if you're the rare exception, but it seems most unlikely.
Never mind Microsoft. What employer ever behaved substantially differently?
I was brought up with the idea that doing as many hours as it takes (unpaid) was precisely what distinguishes a professional job from a unionised blue-collar one.
Though a change in that culture would perhaps be no bad thing. If she can contribute to that then good on her!
Meanwhile in the physical world. If I'm out walking, I'll expect to meet random people and domestic animals.
With my own species I can exchange a friendly greeting. Not all of them, but many are fine with it, and some even like to extend it to a good natter.
With our canine friends, I can exchange something more physical: a pat on the back, a tickle behind the ears, even a hug. Again, not all of them, but friendly individuals will bound up to me and introduce themselves. Obviously no power games, no question of sexual politics, just a physical expression of being friendly.
And I sometimes think, what kind of a world is it where such casual friendship can only come from a different species!
So the programmer is now responsible for ...
... for pointing out when a request appears to make no sense.
When some PHB asks you for a print button in a webpage, do you
(a) add a "print" button because you know no better
(b) add a button labelled "print", and surreptitiously check PHB's browser settings for what will work for him?
(c) point out that print is a browser function, and that to do it from a web page is at best re-inventing a wheel, and at worst a security hole (when someone compromises their own security so it'll "work" for them).
OK, the webpage is one scenario among many. In another case, the arguments might be different, and a sensible outcome might include the button. But I suspect that's not the kind of scenario where your programmer is pushing back against a request.
Hang on - I'm a rural business, and bandwidth means I can Skype (or Zoom, or hangout, or whateerthehellcustomerwants) in to meetings
Yep. That's what 2Mb/s ADSL broadband did for me when it arrived in 2004. Made all the difference to my ability to work.
Having twenty times faster than that now is nice, but makes very little difference. Except when it fails.
You don't need modern broadband speeds for exchanging red tape with government, no matter how extensive the forms farmers deal with. If farmers need it for business, it'll be their fancy precision equipment. Perhaps if things like the drone-mounted video camera and the smart combine harvester are exchanging data in real time via the cloud ...
I wrote some thoughts on rural broadband a while back. The priority should be ADSL-grade always-on connectivity; superfast is not an issue.
I had a crippling RSI some years back. Learned to use a mouse left-handed. And gave up some mouse-intensive ways of wasting time.
It took quite a while - many months of often-severe pain - but the RSI went away. Now I can use a mouse (or a laptop device) with either hand. And perhaps most importantly, I know the early signs of RSI, and can modify my computing behaviour any time it threatens.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
