Posts by Dave

Too many words?

Hasn't your headline got three too many words in it?

Business As Usual

I see our loveable Home Secretary is saying that we're keeping the law in place while things are reviewed. I see that as "while we look for a loophole that means we get to keep the database".

The law should be changed so that DNA is only added to the database on conviction.

AA1

For those that don't like the 701, the Acer Aspire One is worth looking it. It's what the 900 series probably should have been.

Well-known method?

I guess a video of someone installing Vista doesn't count as a way of destroying a computer?

Accuracy

Since when did facts get in the way of a good story?

"If the facts do not conform to the theory then they must be disposed of".

@turn them off...

I've had several PSU failures where the reservoir capacitors have cooked themselves to the point where they're capable of running the system but not starting it due to the switch-on surge. Also, if you've got a hard disk where the bearings are starting to go, letting the drive spin down and cool down may be enough to guarantee that the drive won't come back up again. Plus one where, on switch-on, a small tantalum capacitor on the board went bang.

Repeated cycling might not in itself cause the failures, but many failures do occur at the moment of power-on.

I leave some of my machines on 24/7 because I run my own mailserver and web server from home, plus I connect back at all sorts of times to use facilities on the machines.

Spam Filters

I actually appreciate the spammers all using consistent URLs. My spam filter bins anything with livefilestore in the message.

Tips Welcome!

As someone who is capable of putting Fedora/Ubuntu onto my Aspire One but has so far refrained, keep up the little tips. Some I've already worked out or found on-line, but occasionally a new good one comes to light. So far I'm living with the Acer-supplied interface because for my use, there aren't that many programs I need to open regularly and the full menu tweak describedf here and elsewhere caters for the less-frequent ones.

I've never used xfce before, so that's a useful learning experience in itself.

On the subject of rubbish, my vacuum cleaner sucks.

Asshat!

I even have an asshat icon I use occasionally so I guess it has to get my vote.

Not what it says on the tin?

I suspect the ISPs need to look closely at their contracts. If they've paid for (say) 100Mbit with no restriction then they should be able to use 100% of that at all times regardless of the nature of the traffic. If the ISP wants to do its own traffic filtering, or ask Bell Canada to do it for them, then fair enough, but if I'm paying for a large pipe I don't expect someone else to block it. If they haven't got the capacity to cope then either they should have refused to sell it or jacked up the price and used that to improve capacity.

If it ain't broke...

"It is hard to find another example like the DNS where such a vital aspect of the critical national infrastructure is left in the hands of a private company which is unlicensed and unregulated."

At least it works in a fairly efficient manner. It's hard to find an example of critical national infrastructure controlled by government that does that.

The internet works precisely because it was designed and put together by people more interested in making it work than money, politics or any of that. The only downside is that they forgot to include security, but for many years we didn't even really need that.

Clone the SW

If they really want to make it work, why not take the same starting point (BSD) and develop their own variant of the OS that will run code written for Macs? The obvious precedents here are that Wine exists to run Windows code on Linux, Linux exists (being a look-and-feel for Unix), pretty much all GUI interfaces can be encouraged to look like each other...

If they really think Apple are unreasonable, there's plenty of scope to do something about it.

Re: not again please

The pilots don't need to strike, they just need to all refuse to have an ID card. That way, they turn up for work, get refused entry and the flight doesn't take off. that way it's not a strike, it's the government preventing them from working.

Expectations

If your expectations are set correctly then you'll be fine with a netbook. I don't expect my AA1 to be able to edit video or do major number-crunching. A couple of weeks ago I was sat in a meeting at work, using it with VNC to get back to my desktop PC and that worked just fine. It's small, lightweight and easy to carry. I haven't bothered replacing the Acer desktop because it actually meets my needs for the most part. I can open a terminal window if I get command-line withdrawal, and I've enabled the right-click menu.

OK, so I've customised it to my preferred email client and IM program, plus installed the Bluetooth package from the Acer website (which works just fine with an external USB dongle). However, many people with a Windows laptop would do the same, the main thing is that it was all easy to do.

Had I expected it to do as well as my full-spec laptop then I can see that I'd be disappointed, but I use it where it's appropriate. Now, a small USB handset and a decent 3G/GSM widget with appropriate software and I'd be able to replace my smartphone...

Go on Frog, Make My Day

"Hell, the entire Internet itself could be banned in France. "

If only...

Restraint of Trade

In the UK we have the restraint of trade laws to stop things like this. Time and again, the courts have held that while a short period is OK, anything beyond that falls foul of the unfair contract law by attempting to prevent someone from plying his trade. As such, people sign these longer agreements with the expectation that anything over three months is likely to be invalid.

Normally the fairer way to do it is insist on a six-month or (or more) notice period and then insist that the employee 'works' his notice as gardening leave.

Landlords? (Re: There is a book)

I know some landlords ought to be strung up, but there is a genuine market for people who don't want to own a house. The tenant doesn't have the expenses of maintaining the property, doesn't have to sell the property when leaving and so can move quickly, might not want to stay long, especially if on temporary assignment somewhere.

Missing the point?

"The government says ContactPoint will help to prevent tragedies such as the abuse and murder of Victoria Climbié, who was killed by her guardians in 2000 despite repeated visits from doctors and social services."

So despite the fact that they had all the information, they still failed to act on it? How is the database going to help in the face of such incompetence? Now we've had another practical example that it's not the lack of information causing the problem, merely the total failure of people to act on the information.

Ignorance is cheaper

Unknowingly violating a patent is not good and can lead to lawsuits and financial loss. If it can be proven that you knowingly and willfully violated a patent (i.e. the plaintiff can prove that you read the patent and therefore were aware of its contents) then it can be a lot more expensive.

What this guy is pointing out is that looking at a pile of legal gobbledegook is the worst of all worlds because you may still not be aware of what the patent was about and if you then go on to violate it, you'll get stung for the higher amount because legal people won't believe you didn't understand their language.

Weren't patents intended to encourage innovation, not stifle it?

DNSSec Proxy?

I guess what us end-users with our own DNS servers need is a patch that allows trusted stuff inside the firewall to carry on as before, querying the local DNS server that will then use DNSSec out on the Wild Wild Web^WInternet.

So, as asked by others, is there a secure public service available we can use. More to the point, *can* there be a secure public service available until all authoritative servers support it? Otherwise how does my DNSSec server know that it's talking to the real server for the site I'm trying to access?

@Graham Marsden

I still use that trick to identify STD prefixes. It doesn't always work, because as you say, they ran out of workable ones, but there are some quite interesting obscure ones in the system.

Software?

I bet that if someone ratted on them to Microsoft, BSA, etc. that they were pirating software, they'd have the place saturated with lawyers and we'd solve the problem that way.

Or the pirates would take the lawyers hostage and threaten to let them go if we didn't pay them lots of money...

Already Got One

I've already got one (well, technically it belongs to my son), courtesy of being able to ship it to a US address and then collecting it. It is based on Linux, is easy and fun to use and for those who understand how to get VMWare or other virtual machine stuff running, you can get an emulation version to run on your own machine so you can learn without having to use the child-sized keyboard. And you can interact between your own machine and the XO exactly as if you were running an XO yourself.

I guess it's a year old now, the original offer was November last year.

Errrr...

I know Rhinos are horny creatures, but I'm wondering not so much about who would collect the semen but how they'd go about collecting it. I'm also wondering whether I really want to know.

I almost picked the coat icon but I'm not sure I'd want to find out what's in the pockets.

The Purpose of ContactPoint

It's not to prevent abuse, it's so that they've got a full list of people that will need ID cards as they become adults. It's been shown that even with the information there's still enough incompetence in the system for abuse to continue unchecked.

Personally I'd like to see it a requirement in law that every time there's access to a particular entry, the system should automatically generate a letter to the parent/guardian informing them that it's happened. Those with something to worry about might be put off by the volume of junk mail, and the rest of us will see who's snooping. Also, charge local authorities £10/subject access to discourage trivial queries. Data losses can then be charged the same way, so if you lose a CD with 10,000 records, you've just cost your local taxpayers £100,000.

Better still, abolish it as soon as possible after the next election. I call on David Cameron to have a draft bill ready for immediate passage through parliament requiring the dismantling of this and other intrusive, useless and expensive measures.

@Iam Me

I'm guessing you're on the left-hand side of the pond? If so, are you aware that your own government has some scary schemes as well? The level of detail they record about people flying to the US is quite intrusive, and they make no guarantee about what they'll do with it. I'm still looking forward to the day when the EU is organised enough to put in place a reciprocal scheme, just like Brazil did with the fingerprints.

Having said that, yes we do need a change of government. Hanging over the edge of the Police State cliff by our fingertips, hoping that something will change and we'll be able to pull ourselves back up again before falling to the death of freedom.

When's V2 out?

It sounds like a promising start, but I want one where I don't have to interact with any Google services (except the search engines when I want to). I have my own email server and IM accounts that aren't Google ones. I'd also prefer to pay a bit for the phone and not get screwed on the £40/mo tariff. I have enough trouble using up the cheaper one I'm on at the moment, given that I rarely send texts or make phone calls (but use data a lot). I'd also prefer it not to be network-locked. I assume that's a function of the radio module and not the apps processor, otherwise it would have been hacked already, given the open-source nature of the code.

If they'd care to have V2 out for early 2009 when my current contract expires, I'll have a look.

UK Unlimited?

I see Apple have caught on to the UK definition of 'unlimited'.

Multiple Credit Cards

It's always a good idea to have more than one - if you only have one card and it gets compromised and cancelled, you're stuck. If you have two, then any problems with one (including disputes with the card issuer), you just stop using it and switch immediately to the other one. Someone in Italy decided to use one of my cards to buy airline tickets once, so I just switched to another one.

I also find that it helps to have one for 'must have' stuff, which is used for petrol and food and is paid off every month because it is only for basics (and so should be affordable), and another for discretionary spending for toys and gadgets and holidays. That also gets paid off every month but in the event of a misjudgement, it doesn't increase the cost of the basics.

As for credit tarts - you certainly can't fault them for doing it, it shows some level of control over finances to be able to manage it, even if the original need was due to getting into excessive debt in the first place. I know I did it once when I needed a loan and a credit card offer came through the door offering a better rate of interest than anything else on the market so I took them up on it. I also noticed that subsequent offers from that company had changes in the small print to stop me doing the same thing again (as in a requirement to actually use the card regularly).

I'm probably on the shit-list because the only times I've paid interest on a credit card was as idiot-tax when I forgot to make a payment in time, otherwise it's paid off in full.

In the good old days I had several different cards because I was bombarded with offers from everyone and his dog so I decided to see how many I could get. I lost interest at seven, and never used some of them so I'm down to a more reasonable number now.

Hold Tight

That's OK, just wait for the middle of January and it'll all start getting better. At least that's what people have promised for most of the last few years. Obama is going to have fun sorting this mess.

Supermarkets

I see she's trying to get supermarkets to collect biometric data for her. Good way to get people to shop at the competition (provided they don't all do it).

Socialists

I find it somewhat ironic that some people in the US consider Obama to be a socialist. They ought to come visit Europe (the top-left part of that big landmass to the right of the US east coast) and see proper socialism. What you think of as socialism is still well into the capitalist part of the political spectrum.

The Solution

Perhaps the solution is to abolish ContactPoint? Then we'd all be happy and safe.

Already Seen the Features

The Aspire One appears to have a Network Manager that does exactly what's described here, and has the nice little eject buttons on its file manager for removable media. So far they've both worked very well, so it is possible to have the features. Of course, I haven't yet had chance to try any 3G connections on it but it's handled wired and wireless OK.

Not Surprised...

...that the Times totally ignored the main point and focused on the nuclear bit. As with the Daily Wail, they sell papers by getting the readers all worked up about things that are often totally irrelevant.

And a comment for Gareth Jones - several companies were making good progress on lean-burn engines until vested interests got the EU to specify that only catalytic converters with their inherent inefficiencies and use of rare metals were allowed on petrol vehicles. Perhaps they should rethink that and encourage engines that burn less fuel. It's the same in California - they've got very stringent emissions regulations but what you have to do to the engine to achieve it means you burn twice as much fuel per mile.

@Jaowon

I'm not in the phone book, I've ticked the box on the electoral roll to restrict access to my data. I'm not impossible to find, but you'd have to try a bit harder than just the phone book.

It also helps that there is someone who writes books and shares my name, so even Google finds him for several pages before I appear.

@Adam Oellermann

"Bruce Schneier writes his books and essays by generating random alphanumeric text of an appropriate length and then decrypting it."

I think some tabloid journalists try to imitate him, but they haven't got their algorithms quite right.

Nominet or the Government?

I'm afraid I trust Nominet more than I trust this government on running the .uk registry. Nominet do at least try to do it on a not-for-profit basis, whereas HMG would probably charge us at least three times as much for a much poorer service. You probably wouldn't be able to register thisgovernmentsucks.co.uk (someone has...) if HMG was in charge.

@Damn Yank

Yes, we have a licence fee, it funds the BBC and helps helps keep adverts down (the BBC only show trailers for their own stuff and not in the middle of programmes). Contrast this to something I saw in the US a couple of months ago, with a running time of 152 minutes and occupying three and a half hours. By my reckoning that's just short of an hour of adverts for two and a half hours of programme.

Having said that, the licence authority are a bunch of offensive bastards who don't understand that some people really don't have TVs.

NTP and MSF

I have a clock that tracks MSF (or DCF if it can't get MSF), plus I have various computers that sync to network time, so I haven't needed the speaking clock for several years.

#include "rant.h"

As anyone and his dog can do HTML but only the warped can handle preprocessor directives...

It's wrong to legislate for the majority of people based on one or two improbably edge cases, which is what we're trying to do here. It glosses over the fact that it wasn't a lack of information that caused the death of a child, it was lack of resources and departmental incompetence.

Imagine if we tried to prevent traffic accidents by reducing speed limits to 30mph, and when that didn't result in zero occurrences, dropping it to 20mph and eventually abolishing road transport. Then, shock horror, someone might trip over while walking...

As for not being registered at a school as grounds for concern, what about all the children who are home educated perfectly well and often to a higher standard than the school system allows. Certainly some children may be at risk under such circumstances, but how many children attend school and are also at risk but wouldn't show up as such on a database?

It's not politically correct, but freedom has a price. Victoria Climbie was unfortunately one of those who paid the price for our freedom. Many more children and adults paid with their lives in WW2 in the hope that we'd be free. Once we refuse to accept occasional casualties we've lost our freedom because we'll all be regulated and monitored and forbidden to do anything.