* Posts by graeme leggett

2467 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Oct 2007

Labour Party website DDoS'd by ruly democratic mob

graeme leggett Silver badge

But Mr Corbyn hasn't actually saluted the "indefatigability" of the Russian leader has he?

I do hope your friends meant "different perspective" rather than unbiased.

graeme leggett Silver badge

Re: Ha

It started as reading as a tribute to Davids Nobbs but you missed out " neo-Trotskyists, crypto-Trotskyists, union leaders, Communist union leaders..." Among others.

Stop taking drug advice from Kim Kardashian on Twitter, sighs watchdog

graeme leggett Silver badge

Re: Most shocking!

Graduated with what though?

Microsoft co-founder recovers ship's bell of 'The Mighty Hood'

graeme leggett Silver badge

Re: The Impact On The Public Was Terrible @Vorland

To expand on the Washington treaty angle. And making it a bit simpler along the way.

The British had a choice pre-war while complying with the treaty: either go with 14-inch guns and have the ships probably built before it all kicked off, or wait until it was clear the treaty was done for (with the out break of war) and build bigger gunned ships which wouldn't be ready for a couple of years.

As the idea was to prevent war, the British couldn't be seen to abandon the treaty. The US being neutral at start of war had time after the collapse of the treaty limits but before entering the war to build 16-inch gunned ships.

graeme leggett Silver badge

Re: The Impact On The Public Was Terrible

In some respects unlucky to be hit at all in the opening salvoes between the ships rather than after several exchanges.

'Sunspots drive climate change' theory is result of ancient error

graeme leggett Silver badge

Re: WTF

The treatment for ulcers was milk diets, antacids and bismuth. Which worked up to a point

Since prevailing view was that bacteria would not thrive in stomach, there was no expectation that an antibacterial treatment was an avenue worth pursuing.

Its not until Marshall et al in the 80s challenge view and prove existence and role of helicobacter pylori (as it is now known) that antibiotic (with acid suppression) therapy adopted.

Possibly complicating pre-Marshall situation/data is fact that bismuth compounds do have an antibacterial action on h pylori.

graeme leggett Silver badge

Re: WTF

Different equipment, different sampling, different processing are three of the most common ways for two entities trying to measure the same thing.

So far as I can tell from reading the published paper, the issue is how to make the modern measurements consistent - as in if you took your modern telescope back in time you would get the same result as the 18th century astronomer - with older measurements so that then you can see if there has been a trend change.

graeme leggett Silver badge

a golden rule

If you rely on something to prove your point, check the data is solid

And its corollary

If you want to challenge something, check their data

Sane people, I BEG you: Stop the software defined moronocalypse

graeme leggett Silver badge

Re: Is there a standard to aspire to?

Given there are standards, then the question must be how to get them used/specified in production.

My lab work is under iso/iec 17025. my client uses my analysis for their work. They pay a bit extra than someone else doing similar analysis because its accredited.

They make a decision based on my work with confidence (99.5%) because that's what the accreditation means. if there's a problem then I can show from my records that I and my colleagues and my accredited suppliers did everything right. And if records show we didn't then someone a) has to make correction/recompense and b) improve the system (if possible) to stop it happening again.

Now routine analysis is a long established business, relatively simple, with clear objectives, and there's a demand for accuracy and consistency, so analysis to 17025 is easily specified by a client, may be a legal requirement, there's competition among suppliers and so doesn't carry much premium.

By comparison, with programming/software development I'm guessing there aren't the same drivers to make an accredited output. And as there isn't a physical property as such it would be harder for companies to develop and market accredited sections of code for others to use without having lots of black box components. ( compare with me buying 25g of certified standard - once its gone I have to buy another)

graeme leggett Silver badge

Is there a standard to aspire to?

Meaning an ISO standard for writing code/managing projects

And if so, how often is it encountered or applied?

Perhaps middle-aged blokes SHOULDN'T try 34-hour-long road trips

graeme leggett Silver badge

one question

How big an engine, that the costs (time, tolls, petrol, stress etc) of the grand tour outweigh the Portuguese tax?

Death to DRM, we'll kill it in a decade, chants EFF

graeme leggett Silver badge

Re: Why I buy Epson printers

I'm guessing the printers are cheaper to buy because some of the true cost is spread over the price of the refills.

But HP don't want to make refills cheaper and printers more expensive because in that case they would expect fewer printer sales - the average home user buying on upfront cost rather than running costs.

Biggest security update in history coming up: Google patches Android hijack bug Stagefright

graeme leggett Silver badge

I presume they won't be issuing the patches on the second Tuesday in the month, even if the slot is now free.

If you read anything today about ICANN taking over the internet, make sure it's this

graeme leggett Silver badge

Re: Hrrmm....

FIFA crossed with some of the elements of that other Switzerland-based organization - the IOC?

Hacklands introducing geeks to something called 'outdoors'

graeme leggett Silver badge

Opening

For someone to come up with a load of puns on computer terms using flora and fauna.

I'm working on something to do with campfires and foxes....

Gay emojis? GAY EMOJIS?! Not here in Russia, comrade

graeme leggett Silver badge

Re: Putin's Young Guard

Obviously the complete opposite to Putin's Old Guard....now they would be reactionary...

No, Microsoft: Your one-billion Windows 10 goal is just sad ... really sad

graeme leggett Silver badge

"mobile usage already significantly exceeds PC usage"

Following on the point about measuring the time split. How much is change from one form to other, and how much by increases in the availability of the newcomer.

Is this because in the past, we spent the journey on the tube to work looking at the newspaper or fellow commuters stubble, spent 8 hours on the corporate Windows PC (including an hour of lunch playing solitaire) then went home to watch CoronationEndersFarm.

Now we watch videos on our Android phone/iphone the tube on the way to work, spend 7 hours on corporate PC (and one hour on the phone checking social media), more social media on the way home and then the rest of the evening showing cat videos to our partners with one eye on the happenings in E17/Weatherfield/the Dales.

Think beyond the Beeb: Gov consultation is crucial for free telly

graeme leggett Silver badge

Re: The rest of the licence fee

thanks for sorting my confusion twixt the one 4th channel and the other.

graeme leggett Silver badge

The rest of the licence fee

If the licence fee is torched, what happens to that bit that goes to Channel 4?

Or does that no longer happen?

And on that bombshell: Top Gear's Clarkson to reappear on Amazon

graeme leggett Silver badge

They frequently modified cars on the show. Just not how mainstream modders do.

graeme leggett Silver badge

Re: 30 grand is not really a punishment

"in what the shows do, where and when"

Wouldn't have worked with Clarkson, as he effectively wrote a fair bit of the script. I remember them joking when they got an award for "Best Unscripted" programme".

graeme leggett Silver badge

Re: Small potatoes?

The budget was only BBC2 sized. But that vehicle manufacturers (or the owners of cars), the British Armed Forces etc would be prepared to make things available probably made things a lot easier.

Consider the regular challenges. Filming costs aside many of them didn't spend much on the raw material the "buy a mid-engine sports car for £500" sort of thing.

Giant Facebook SOLAR LASER DRONE to FEED interwebs into YOUR FACE

graeme leggett Silver badge

name choice

not to be confused with Lockheed MQM-105 Aquila. you don't want one of them overhead.

Given its size, wouldn't naming it after one of the New World birds with a large wingspan such as Vultur gryphus make more sense.

Let's all binge on Blake’s 7 and help save the BBC ... from itself

graeme leggett Silver badge

Re: Mine!

Not everything was made for the BBC on the basis of perpetual ownership.

With the older stuff made in a time before VHS let alone DVD the actor, writer contracts etc were based on one or two showings. While a sum would be paid upfront for this, if there were further showings, then repeat fees were due to those involved.

Hence if material from the archive is to be shown then there may be (admittedly small) cheques to be made out to the actors (or in the case of Daleks, Terry Nation's estate).

graeme leggett Silver badge

" if the BBC Store finally allows people to access it"

More interesting to see how much people are prepared to pay to see it.

Google turns cookie monster on AdSense, DoubleClick clients

graeme leggett Silver badge

"But neither side will tell me what that message needs to say..."

Something along the lines of.

"This website uses cookies so that the adverts (and it's Google that decides what they are not me) that appear while you are reading it should be relevant to you. That means that I get paid more for including those ads, which means I can afford to let you read this stuff for free.

If you are not happy with targeted ads, then you are welcome to go and look at other websites, perhaps they've got what you want. I'd like to make an exception - I'm certain you're a nice person - but website hosting costs money."

Wanted: beta testers for El Reg’s Android app

graeme leggett Silver badge

Re: It's a start but....

The windows phone app mostly works I can read the articles but it's just that I have to open a browser to explode in splenetic rage offer my personal opinion in the forum.

Ofcom wants to ease the pain of switching mobile networks. Good luck

graeme leggett Silver badge

Re: Slamming

"pay the customer £100 a month. And make the mobile companies MD personally liable."

harsh, disproportionate and excessively punitive - I like it.

Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo crackup verdict: Pilot error

graeme leggett Silver badge

"Alsbury had a relatively unusual background for a test pilot."

That section reads as a roundabout way of saying he lacked the experience that would normally be expected of anyone on the cutting edge of aviation.

Google Californian warehouse workers file to form union

graeme leggett Silver badge

"failing electrical systems resulting in fires."

One for getting the US equivalent of the HSE or local authority Environmental Services involved?

Google bows to inevitable, stops forcing Google+ logins on YouTubers

graeme leggett Silver badge

Re: g+

or A flat?

Happy birthday, Amiga: The 'other' home computer turns 30

graeme leggett Silver badge

Re: Memories

I had an unholy stack off the side of my A500+

A memory expansion, an HD, and then the huge lumpen CDROM (A520?) on the end.

As a testament to the home-builderynessability of the Amiga, it was a SCSI HD on a SCSI board that some people I knew had built and written their own drivers (or whatnot) for.

New study into lack of women in Tech: It's not the men's fault

graeme leggett Silver badge

question

is there a similar explanation for differences in number of women in STEM in other nations?

Post-pub nosh neckfiller: Southern biscuits and gravy

graeme leggett Silver badge

" between an American biscuit and a Brit scone is the former is made without sugar"

Remind me never to eat your cheese scones nor beef cobbler....

It’s DEJA VU: Customer forgets to tell us about essential feature AGAIN

graeme leggett Silver badge

Actors

That was Stuart Fell in that first film clip wasn't it?

YOU! DEGRASSE! It's time to make Pluto a proper planet again, says NASA boffin

graeme leggett Silver badge

Re: IANAA, but...

could we reclassify it from a dwarf to an "eccentric planet"?

Beaten blokes hate the women who frag them in online games

graeme leggett Silver badge

Major and minor flaws?

This is based on the reactions to the perception to how the researchers played and the associated voice. But they did not include a control group - they had the data there potentially but didn't use it.

They also seem to have tried to compensate for any differences in their playing style (and that of the other players) in the statistics rather than in attempting more standardization (or a larger dataset). What's that phrase about changing the experiment by interacting with it?

The dataset size does not seem to have been determined prior to the experiment (actual size was N = 126). One interpretation of the statement in the report " We stopped at 163 as this is a substantial time effort." is they ran out of time/got tired/got bored/had something else they needed to do rather than X games is the right amount to play to get good answers.

That leaves open the question as to whether the experiment had sufficient power - a good statistics treatment of research should discuss this in the paper - in the first place for a significant difference to be found. If you throw enough permutations at an data block, something will stick, even if just due to the random distribution of the data. As exemplified by "scientists say X will give you cancer" interpretations by newspapers.

I also note they are reusing data from a previous experiment - " Kuznekoff and Rose’s (2013) original study" - http://nms.sagepub.com/content/15/4/541 New Media & Society June 2013 (first published online in 2012) so there's a second element to the possibility that a better study would have been done if they had designed their experiment and got new data rather than try and fit an experiment to previous work.

Personal declaration of my own skillset in this area - reading some books (No Starch publishing's Statistics Done Wrong), and listening to the radio (Radio4's More or Less: Behind the Stats), and a large dash of cynicism.

SpaceX's blast shock delays world's MOST POWERFUL ROCKET

graeme leggett Silver badge

Re: OK Say you get to Mars

Guess first thing is to achieve Mars orbit and build a station there.

Reminds me of Millennium 2.2 (on the Amiga and other platforms)

Here's why Whittingdale kicked a subscription BBC into the future

graeme leggett Silver badge

Re: bollocks

I think they see it in terms of the middle classes listening to Radio 2, 3, 4 during the day, and in the evening watching the News, Only Connect, Springwatch etc while the low incomes only go to BBC1 to watch Eastenders before changing over to watch Emmerdale, New Faces/Opportunity Knocks Britains Got Talent etc on the other side.

Bill Hicks: 25 years on from the cult comedian's big break

graeme leggett Silver badge

I think I can compensate for your lack of awareness in that I bought four CDs (Arizona Bay - what if California fell into the sea - was one) of his material and [I think] a VHS.

I ought to dig them out again. While his material was edgy at the time, it seemed to come from a genuine philosophy to hold the subject matter up to critical inspection rather than a simple desire to shock.

He used paradox in an interesting way. His response to menacing redneck Christians after a gig where he poked fun at Jesus - "so, forgive me" (he of course told it better)

GOOGLE GMAIL ATE MY LINUX: Gobbled email enrages Torvalds

graeme leggett Silver badge

" that its spam filter's rate of false positives is down to less than 0.05 per cent."

but that's just a single statistic. an average across all mailboxes. Without knowing something more descriptive (such as the Coefficient of Variance) you can't really measure their success as experienced by users.

You could get 0.05% by having 99 users with an exceptional 0.01% false positives and one unlucky sod with 4% falsely identified

Probably a better descriptor would be the Positive predictive value (http://www.networkworld.com/article/2336754/software/spam-and-statistics.html)

Microsoft to Windows 10 consumers: You'll get updates LIKE IT or NOT

graeme leggett Silver badge

I went and saw if there was anything about WSUS and Windows 10

http://windowsitpro.com/patch-tuesday/windows-update-business-better-says-microsoft

an article drawing on an interview with Stella Chernyak, "Senior Director at Microsoft"

"Microsoft isn’t replacing WSUS or SCCM, only providing an additional mechanism that the company believes will be better. Stella suggested that Windows Update for Business is like WSUS Lite. It’s Windows Update with some of the controls of WSUS, particularly different is where the updates are delivered from and where they are stored"

So it seems to be aimed at companies without an on-site WSUS installation. presumably the sort using lots of cloudy services

Blighty's BONKERS BANKING BONKING BONANZA: Apple Pay arrives

graeme leggett Silver badge

Re: Gone are the days of searching for your wallet

You need your wallet when shopping for your Tesco Clubcard, Nectar Card, Shell drivers card etc...

And if I drop in at the library on the way back from the shops, I'll need my library card too.

graeme leggett Silver badge

"50% mark of cashless transactions earlier this year"

But that includes all use of debit cards etc and not just contactless. And with everyone already happy with doing chip and pin, why would they swap to contactless.

I don't know how significant contactless use is. I suspect it must all be going on in advanced civilisation such as exists in London. Out here in the sticks I have yet to notice anyone doing a contactless payment.

Post-pub nosh neckfiller: Chopstick-collapsing Spam musubi

graeme leggett Silver badge

Re: Swap the spam for corned beef

Then replace the sushi with a packet of Savoury Rice. No need to bother with getting it to stick together; just put in a bowl and throw corned beef on top. If you're hungry, you're hungry.

Oxford Uni unearths 800-year-old document to seize domain names

graeme leggett Silver badge

Re: Meanwhile

Top. Men.

Canadian dirtbag jailed for SWAT'ing, doxing women gamers

graeme leggett Silver badge

That would make sense in this case. Staying in the safe place effectively reinforcing the distance between that place and the outside world.

Is there any indication that this youth will receive help? we hear Canada has good medical provision, but I've never heard anything about quality of its mental health services.

graeme leggett Silver badge

"that the teenager worked by day in the computer industry, and spent his nights gaming and ordering pizza. "

One of those cases where getting out more really would have been good advice?

THIS MEANS WAR between USA and Japan! GIANT ROBOT WAR

graeme leggett Silver badge

Re: Errrr ...

the first Battletech is made up of an assemblage of Japanese mecha designs (eg from works such as Macross). Somewhere along the way they realised they were in a sticky position vis a vis copyright and dropped them.

We tried using Windows 10 for real work and ... oh, the horror

graeme leggett Silver badge

Re: MS should take note

"Do MS know why people make their own custom android roms"

I suspect they are aware that some people like a minimalist approach, and also have handle on how few those people are compared with the installed userbase and so discount as a minority not worth considering.