Posts by David Roberts 1606 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Jan 2007
Must be, because all my shirts have button down pockets which fit a mobile phone (Galaxy S3 or S4).
Which sadly makes most of the article and comments irrelevant.
I don't wear a coat (just going through the pockets) and I could perhaps dispense with trousers if I didn't need two cargo pockets to hold both wallets. Full of bloody plastic. The person who invents a phone app which will replace loyalty cards, credit cards, driving licence, bus pass, rail card, European health card, and all the other oblong bits of plastic which use essentially the same technology to do essentially the same thing will be my friend for life. Or for a start just one fucking card for every fucking retailer which can be registered at the fucking till. Nurse! Nurse! My pills! The pink ones! Quickly!!
Just retired an HP Deskjet which was 10-15 years old because usage had dropped to the point that the ink was always dry when I wanted to print. Quality printer with auto duplexing and still works fine. Just not in my use case.
I replaced it with an HP Colour laser jet. Hopefully another 10 years service.
I did note that nearly all the revenue for printers was from consumables. Perhaps they are losing ground there.
On the PC front I am using two Vista era PCs with Windows 8.1 because it gave them a new lease of life. Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad. Neither seem to max out on processor. Both waiting for an SSD upgrade.
So these days, much like with cars, PCs and printers just keep on going.
HP should have gone for manufacturing mobile phones. These are still on the 18 month churn for new hardware and software. PC sales are going to be slow from now on.
Thinking about this now, they are talking about a planet bound laser??
So once you have planned the exact destination of the probe and hoisted the light sail then as the earth revolves below you once a day the beam comes on for a few seconds (to burn a path through the atmosphere and any passing seagulls) then the beam flicks across the sail and gives you a little nudge?
Must brush up on my Motie, but I assume realistic propulsion requires a static base up in space with a large energy source to drive the laser and also enough mass that it does not fly off in the opposite direction propelled by its photon drive.
This also makes me wonder (given that the propulsion from our sun is deemed woefully inadequate) how many times you would have to slingshot around your target system before you could capture enough photons to slow you down.
Finally, if you can generate enough energy to accelerate your tiny probe to 1/3 light speed using a static laser, why is this better than rocket propulsion for at least the initial boost? I thought the main reason for a light sail was that it freed you from carrying a lot of reaction mass with you because it was supplied by the Universe but the downside was that you accelerated and decelerated very slowly. Laser boosting gave you an extra push out of your solar system but with issues later on when you wanted to slow down.
I can see that you may still need Android because of the plethora of small apps aimed directly at smartphone/tablet hardware. Few desktops have built in support of compass, accelerometer etc.
I can see the attraction of carrying your phone around then plugging it into a TV or monitor to get the full screen experience and full fat Linux programs for email, office automation, Usenet (remember that?). You still need to carry a keyboard but that can be quite light.
But why oh why oh why aren't they showing a tablet with the choice of two desktops? My Xperia Z has a high resolution screen and I can already attach a keyboard and mouse. Screen area at 10.1" is comparable to netbooks.
Is this just a marketing thing to differentiate from a very expensive Linux/Windows laptop with detachable keyboard which can also run Android? Scared of polluting a high priced market?
The apparent mitigation is to throttle traffic from any one source or to any one source to prevent overload.
Just had the passing thought that this might trip over net neutrality rules; you should be able to distinguish at the technical level between video streaming and DNS traffic but has this been considered at the legal level?
I suspect that as each force is independent and goes its own way, most of the savings over the first 10 years will be in reduced costs of data centre infrastructure, especially if the consolidated centre is in a low wage low property cost area.
Sharing hardware should give some economies of scale as well.
Presumably a minimum of two data centres with mirrored systems? Be a shame if one data centre had a hiccup (looking at you, Office 365).
Forcing one coherent system on different police authorities is likely to work as well as the single system for the NHS.
Wordpress. People are hunting all the time for Wordpress sites they can compromise. So did someone look for ways to compromise the Mint site, or did a Wordpress hacker find a vulnerable site and then notice what it was hosting?
This wierd pride that claims the attack shows how popular Mint is baffles me.
Like being proud of being mugged because it shows that you are rich. Not that you were a dick and had a few too many beers then wandered down a dark alley.
Most likely it is a desperate excuse after all the posts praising Mint as the answer to any Windows issues, followed by a demonstration that the advice wasn't 100% good in all circumstances.
Have a bit of honesty, and admit the Mint guys screwed up. They were so security naive they apparently used Wordpress on the server they used to distribute Mint. So people now have copies of Mint with back doors. This must at least raise the question "Is this the only foolish thing they did?".
Don't just go "Look, look, Windows 10!" as if this explains, excuses or justifies this total cock up.
The sensible posters have acknowledged that a bad thing happened and noted that hashes from several sources should be checked before installing anything.
The Mint guys should be taking a good hard look at the way they work, and everyone should be giving this breach maximum publicity to try and help all the poor sods who have been compromised.
All those happy people who are enthusiastic about permanent injury and death for idiots waving laser pointers might first like to test the practicality on those convicted of gun and knife crime. Of course this might make the UK seem slightly uncivilised.
Firing back down the laser beam sounds just and proportianate until of course some knob leaves a fixed laser behind taped to the roof of a hospital, just for a laugh.
Main reality check, however; if there isn't the personpower to investigate burglaries, there are no police on the beat and precious few on the roads, the police are not effective despite clear legislation at preventing the possession of firearms and knives then how effective is new legislation likely to be?
Stick the airports out in the sticks where there is cleared land (or sea) all around and simple security measures can spot intruders and you might be able to protect incoming and outgoing flights from attack.
Leaving airports in the middle of built up areas makes effective policing impossible even if you increased the personpower by 10 times. You would need regular vehicle and foot patrols, stop and search, free entry to any premises, constant overhead patrols and more. Police state on steroids.
TL;DR legislation is very rarely the answer. Enforce existing legislation effectively before you add more.
From the postings of victims so far it does seem pretty obvious that some VM customers have had their mail stores stolen or at least analysed in depth.
Given that some of the victims haven't used web access for some time this is unlikely to be a recent browser exploit (unless perhaps they have their account passwords stored long term in cookies).
So either the mail store data has been compromised, or credentials from other modes of access such as IMAP/POP3 have been intercepted. Or possibly the users have re-used passwords which have been stolen elsewhere (not top of the obvious list).
If people have not even logged into the service recently via any means (I can't remember if Virgin offers auto-forward to another account) then this does point to a chunk of the mail store falling into the hands of spammers.
Reaching this tentative conclusion from the information posted so far in the thread is not rocket science. Any reasonably competent email (or IT in general) professional could reach a similar conclusion. However do VM have many on the books, and would they use them if they had? Denying responsibility is easier than investigating and finding something unpleasant.
As it happens I have ntlworld email accounts which are still active, although not very much, and fortunately I haven't seen any SPAM activity so far. This seems to suggest that not all addresses are compromised (or that the spammers are just cherry picking).
A professional ISP would work with the customers to try and establish any common factors - such as which tranche of migrations they were in, or if the were all blueyonder cutomers. It seems as though this isn't the modern way, though.
Hope that the action group can isolate a common factor, but it will be hard without VM cooperation.
Date of migration might be interesting; from the notification emails I have received as far as I can remember not all my accounts migrated at the same time.
UK government and health care data has probably less public trust than Microsoft and W10.
Comprehensive UK medical data is immensley valuable to US researchers - there is no equivalent in the US.
Dip into Private Eye to estimate how trustworthy senior government officials with anything of value.
They can't even afford to send someone round to investigate a burglary.
How many airports and prisons (not even considering any other targets) are there in the UK?
How many trained birds would it take to mount an effective force to cover even half of these, and how long would it take to breed and train them?
This is yet another bit of unachievable fluff which can be anounced as a solution which will be implemented in 2020--{slip}->2025.
Far more practical to employ drone enthusiasts to develop drone killer drones which earn a bounty for downing any unauthorised drones in restricted areas. Positive reinforcement of the development cycle, a TV series just waiting to be made, and use the geeks as live bait for bad guys who's only remaining option is to go after the killer drone operators. Bonus depends on keeping the protected area clear and not endangering planes with your own drone.
I think.
At the time there were two versions; Linux with 4GB and 8GB solid state memory, or a Windows XP version with a HDD.
I worked out that I could buy the Linux version and an OEM XP CD for less than the cost of the XP version, and anyway who wanted spinning rust in a travel PC?
[I needed Windows to run software to manage a few hardware devices with Windows only software, including a TomTom satnav.]
Ran well for a couple or more years and did everything I needed whilst world travelling. However XP just kept getting more bloated and eventually choked on some updates because of lack of space. So it got stored away until I could re-Linux it. Still waiting. I doubt it would run W10 even if that was a free upgrade.
Recently (a year ago?) bought a small HP with W8.1, for much the same reasons. It works fine (especially after the SSD upgrade) and again does everything I need when on the road.
I can't decide if I should upgrade whilst it is still free - W10 sounds generally O.K.(ish) but the snooping, forcing, and general mistrust of MS weighs against this.
I do think that if MS get everyone onto W10 they will save so much on their support costs compared to supporting 4 separate versions (W7, W8, W8.1, W10) that they may well not need to charge. If they want to stay in business they need to keep their OS on the desktop and sell services on top. Of course, logic is not always their obvious strong point.
"Not being familiar with "Bloakey" and apparently on the wrong side of the pond, as well as not knowing much about mortars aside from "Incoming!," what's the chain mail stuff for?"
Not being in any way military myself, I would guess that if you had put the mortar down and lobbed off a few quick rounds it might be a little warm for a while.
If you then decided to move somewhere else a bit sharpish then I assume a mailed glove and mailed shoulder pad might make this a tad less painful.
Looks to have enough suck to clean most carpets.
I hope they have made fan access easy, or banned use near cats.
One occasional grotty task is stripping down laptops to get at the incredibly well concealed fan which has collected cat hair, trouser fluff and other strange stuff and compacted it in the airways. External access to the fan too hard, guys?
[The inner pervert briefly considered a clip on adapter which could avoid those embarrasing "fell over whilst vacuuming nude" visits to A&E and be fully integrated with high definition pr0n but on second thoughts........just don't go there! Although it would be discreet in a laptop......just NO!]
Oh, and I want one just because. Carrying it is not an issue - I had to lug full sized HP network analysers around at one time (X.25 and the like) which made luggable PCs look quite dainty.
Same reason that the email world is full of SPAM.
Thinking people filter and ignore. Idiots click through.
If there was no return at all they would eventually stop.
Oh, and I do most of my browsing on a tablet. I resize the screen to eliminate everything but the text, if possible. So I don't see the majority of ads even when not using an ad blocker. Does this make me guilty of fraud? If so, under which law(s)?
Like the user groups from 30 years ago.
Back in the day all you had to be were enthusiasts who would do all the boring stuff that nobody else could be arsed to. Willingness was the main qualification. Transitioning to a fully accountable public organisation from a geek club in a garden shed should have been possible by now.
However it looks like the focus still needs some adjustment.
I worked in a Software Support Group.
We were a mixture of developers and operators (mainframe) and we supported the OS, the applications, and could also operate the machines. We had our own development systems for testing new software releases, new OS releases and utilities we put together to make things run smoother.
This must have been DevOps as we were a mixture of developers and operators ;-)
Agile used to be "OMG marketing just shipped the demonstrator!"
I think all the Agile and DevOps hype is basically a delivery demonstrator - look, we hacked a small system together over the weekend and it works. Great. Let's scale it and ship it.
Most experienced people know that small teams where responsibilities from requirements capture through to operation are all shared can work very well. The same people also know that the concept just does not scale beyond a certain point.
A spider is more agile than a mouse is more agile than an elephant.
Ability to divert and refocus also matches the size.
Response to an abrupt change can similarly be demonstrated by a simple drop test from a 20 foot tower.
Somewhere there is the ideal team size and composition for the given task.
One size (or strategy) does not fit all.
The work sites seem to be moving ever further North where the climate is less hospitable.
For example Lytham St Annes is a lovely place with nice sandy beaches and a mild climate where people go to retire. Sheffield is also a pretty nice place to live.
So are they picking places with low expectations and high unemployment in the hope that existing staff just won't want to move there? Cheap land, cheap labour, development grants?
Nothing against the places named, just the further North you go the shorter the summer.
This may or may not be a simple question. I would expect at least one revision per year (Budget) however there may be more frequent political tinkering.
Simple case - if the rules are updated twice a year and it takes an extra 6 months to include each set of changed rules then the project is never going to finish.
In a commercial project this would be handled by ever harsher change control and an insistence on delivering to the agreed specification and being paid before the next set of changes were implemented.
However if the Government has just changed all the rules yet again and delivering payments as per last year's spec will just lead to mis-payments and misery then how do you handle change control?
Agile DevOps in this case involves meat sacks and paper.
......the ones listed seem to imply far more macho quality and overall ability than is suggested by the article.
Perhaps Operation Super Big Throbbing Dick to try and out name the other units?
Advertising Standards should be applied to all exercise names.
[Sadly that seems to leave Operation Wide Open Beaver as the only choice.]
Looks like they turned a reasonable profit into a notional loss by writing down some phantom money.
I assume that all this does is reduce their notional capital worth in funny money so that next year's revenue looks like a better return on capital and changes some arbitrary stock market metrics.
Pre-tax loss can be useful for hanging onto real cash as well.
Sadly your chance was there when they offered the 25 quid upgrade to W8.
A bit of fancy footwork and you could do a clean install of 64 bit W8 Pro on 32 bit Vista machines. A touch of Start Menu freeware and Robert is your relative of choice. I did two machines and they are both still flying along.
Agreed they could hoover up Vista but how mamy people out there are still running it?
Perhaps there will be a cut price paid option (like W8) once the year runs out.
Or find a W7 licence?
The upgrade is "free" for a year.
However you can apparently download the ISO.
So what will prevent you from using the ISO after more than a year?
Licence activation?
Just checking because I am resisting upgrading because I don't like being pushed but I am ancient enough to remember similar comments about "out of my cold dead hands" each time a new version of Windows surfaces.
Two or three years down the line there will still be the vociferous deniers but they will be nothing more than background noise on a few tech sites (sorry guys) and most of the world will be on W10.
Microsoft know this which is why (I assume) that they couldn't really give a shit about any bad publicity because getting the herd onto W10 will avoid the problems they had through not forcing people off XP.
The gains from having everyone on the same OS and not having to support several versions are so large that pissing techies off for a couple of years, and losing a fraction of 1% of systems to Mint, aren't really an issue.
Anyway, question is, can I reserve a free update now for use later?
Icon -> for the biggest hat I could see to ward off the incoming shower of shit........
...at least that was the conclusion I reached whilst pondering in the shower.
Your first program lights the world up and you are invincible!
Finished so quickly, too!
And it was perfect!!!!!!
After a while the shine wears off when you realise that you are just going through the same moves time after time.
With maturity comes inventiveness.
You spend a lot of time working out new, complicated and obscurely different ways to achieve the same end result from the same starting point.
Somehow it seems to be getting harder and less inspiring all the same.
With age comes increasing disinterest.
Been there, done that, need a bigger T shirt.
Besides, the lead has run out in your coding pencil.
Still, kids of today think that because they have just discovered it they have invented it.
All the've done is invent new names for the same old same old....
Firstly you should have a hand punch with lots of 3 key combinations for one off cards - this makes it relatively easy to replace a defective card.
Secondly if you can't be arsed to punch a whole new card you just fish a chard out of the punch and block up the incorrect hole by rubbing the chard in with a soft pencil prior to punching the correct hole(s).
Thirdly you always mark up the card deck with thick diagonal lines from a board marker so you can get them (almost) back in order by eye.
Tcah. Kids of today.......
Twitter is so popular - and so fast - that more and more companies are basing their Customer Service front end around it.
The Police are also heavily into Twitter.
Vast numbers of people (meeja doncher know) make a career of running Twitter feeds.
The only people not really on board with this is Twitter, who is not really benefiting financially from all this free love and communication.
Perhaps it is time to charge everyone $1 p/a for a Twitter account, and charge listed companies $10 p/a.
Then you either get a billion dollar revenue stream or you prove that you are never going to make money and stop wasting your time (well, the people working for Twitter must be getting money from somewhere so perhaps stop wasting VC money........oh, hang on, leeching off the amoral........ as you were, then.....)
Openreach? Bunch of Bastards! Do you know what they did to my Gran?
Beat them! Beat them with a stick! Beat them with a big stick! Beat them with a big shitty stick!!
Who's going to pay for the new connections to all the places which don't have high speed Internet? Oh, Market Forces!
Bollocks.
Sell OR to TalkTalk - that'll bloody teach you!
In my limited understanding, Bitcoin et al were founded on the basis that you could have secure financial transactions without needing the oversight of a bank (or banks). This in turn provided a level of untraceability for those who wished to remain anonymous. One weakness demonstrated was that Bitcoin style exchanges provided a significant (or slightly higher?) risk of fraud and mis-operation because there was no financial authority with oversight.
The world (as already noted) has digital currencies now. I doubt there are enough physical tokens to allow even a small amount of the electronic money to be turned into hard cash. The electronic system already has government oversight so at least some traceability (until it wanders into a tax haven).
So the real problem is the existence of tradeable but untraceable physical tokens which drives the black economy worldwide.
So what is all this digital currency shit? Look back at the establishment of the Euro. A multitude of different paper currencies suddenly became no longer valid. You had to dig the wad of cash out from under the mattress and take it to the bank to change it into the new shiny. At which point questions were asked if you suddenly had a bucket load of cash and no record of how you got it.
One case in point - just before the Euro went live, Mallorca was stuffed full of Germans buying up property for cash. Each property had to have a built in laundry (cough). So much so that the German tax authority had at least one office in Mallorca dedicated to checking up on German nationals buying property for cash and asking pointed questions.
So IMHO blockchain stuff is all smoke and mirrors. The aim is to render the old paper currency invalid so that it has to be exchanged for new stuff and taxes paid on concealed wealth, or written off. The same result could be obtained by calling in and reissuing the coinage. Or just ban all transactions in physical money and stick with the existing highly regulated electronic banking systems.
Pro tip - exchange your Yuan Renminbi into dollars pronto. Paper dollars are acceptable worldwide (especially in plain brown envelopes or for bulk deals a discreet briefcase).
IIRC should be one long run, with T junctions by each PC with a short run of cable to the network card.
However it is so simple to reconfigure that people were finding a T connector and side run, then sharing the side run using another T connector...which branched into another T connector.....and tree structures all the way down. Followed by indignation when the network didn't.
"It always puzzled me why it was called 'clicking' in the first place.
A click is a sound, not an action.
Wouldn't 'tap' have been a better word to use?"
Those of a certain age can remember when mice were more robustly constructed.
So pressing a mouse button did produce a very loud "click".
With regards to "tap" the image this gives me is of an air space between the finger and the mouse, pre and post tap - as I sit here tapping away at a keyboard.
Oh, and my venerable Logitech Track Man Wheel does still produce an audible "click".
[I say venerable because I turned it over for a look and it has a sticker on to confirm that it is my personal mouse. Added when I took it into work to ease the beginning of RSI. That was *cough* years ago.]
" I have several end-to-end encrypted and uncrackable communications systems on my PC today (PGP email, Bitmessage, pgpphone, Tor, ...), "
Do you use email servers which are connected end to end (client -> servers -.client) by a secure tunnel?
If not, you are still leaking a lot of data about where the email is from and to, plus flagging it up as someone making an extra effort.
Not knocking it - keeps the buggers on their toes - but without a secure end-to-end tunnel it isn't really 100% secure.
Will probably never work for me. At least not in games, movies, or anything else fast moving.
I can't even watch 3D movies in the Imax because my eyes keep telling me the world is moving but my inner ear disagrees. Stomach as arbiter concludes that I have been poisoned and suggests emergency action.
Icon for me using a VR headset with my PC. ->
"(Beer, even though despite being a muscle relaxant and relieving the pain you really will notice if it's inserted into a bodily orifice.)"
I thought the whole point of beer was to insert it into a bodily orifice.
Just not that one..........
.........unless, of course.......
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