Posts by Chris Miller 3550 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Apr 2007
There's an article on input methods (including handhelds) here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_method_editor
I wonder how effective they are. I remember showing a roman alphabet (pinyin) transliteration to a Chinese colleague and he told me it was like working out a crossword puzzle, so many characters correspond to the same letters.
Building a secure system needn't be hard - I'm sure the gov't has access to resources that would be able to do this. The trouble is that security tends to get in the way of ease of use and unlimited access to information.
If security were the overriding design criterion, there's no reason why a secure system couldn't be delivered. Security problems arise when those responsible for design decisions reject security in favour of other, more important (to them, at least) considerations.
Clever technology, but impractical on a large scale. Even ignoring the argument raised by steogede above, what happens to the flat batteries after replacement? If they're recharged on site, then each 'filling station' will require a multi-megawatt power supply running 24 hours a day. If they're shipped off to some central site then you'll need fleets of (electric?) goods vehicles to move them around the country - compare this with a single tanker arriving (say) daily to deliver 40,000 litres of fuel - that's 1.4TJ (400,000 kWh) of energy.
The fundamental problem is that we have no technology in sight that can get within an order of magnitude of the energy density of petroleum. Until we do, electric vehicles will be confined to short commuting trips within a city.
1 litre of 4-star contains about 10kWh of energy, so that's roughly equivalent to 6 litres of fuel. Even if the electric motor were able to deliver 5x the efficiency of a petrol engine, I don't think that will carry it the full distance of an F1 race. And pit stops to recharge might be somewhat lengthy ...
Sorry to hear of your problems. For my part, and several other contented Nildrammers that I know, the service remains very good. I get a real-world 6Mb on an 8Mb ADSL and the last time I needed help (a couple of BT issues a year or two ago), I talked to a helpful and knowledgeable helpline still based in Aylesbury.
I hope they can maintain their 'independence' from TalkTalk as much as they did from Tiscali - if not, then I'll be off and I doubt I'll be alone.
Don't know about the film, but the book is much more ludicrous than 'Da Vinci' (and that's saying something). The opening chapter has CERN sending their secret hypersonic aircraft to whisk our hero from the East Coast to Geneva in a couple of hours. It goes downhill from there (still sells more copies than God, though ...)
The main reason we don't already have Humvee-sized arthropods is their method of respiration. Rather than lungs, they use a system of long, thin tubes that deliver oxygen to their internal parts. Beyond a certain length, these tubes can't reach the innards without collapsing. Existing large insects and spiders grow about as big as this limit allows; further growth would require the evolution of a different respiration technique.
Sea-dwelling arthropods are not subject to the same limits, as spider crabs and lobsters demonstrate (not to mention prehistoric 2m water-scorpions).
to cleanse data from surplus disk drives. A loving tap with a lump hammer works for me (though this may reduce its resale value on eBay). Alternatively there are plenty of firms willing to put drives through an industrial shredder for you (on site, if you're that paranoid).
Serious security operations have always done this - companies used to love having the maintenance contract for GCHQ, because every time a disk failed they had to provide a new replacement. The second-hand value of a used disk can't possibly compare to the value of data that may (inadvertently) be left exposed on it.
Most organisations that have been allocated this type of address range could probably make do with a class B (if not C). BUT, if you've ever had to reassign large numbers of IP addresses and corresponding subnets, you'll know the cost of doing so is far from negligible. AND, as has been pointed out, any respite so gained wouldn't last all that long.
What about the class D space? Do we really need all of it for multicasts (which aren't in widespread use, except for some routing protocols)??
Johann Gambolputty de von Ausfern-schplenden-schlitter-crasscrenbon-fried-digger-dingle- dangle-dongle-dungle-burnstein-von-knackertrasher-applebanger- horowitz-ticolensic-grander-knotty-speltinkle-gradlich- grumblemeyer-spelterwasser-kurstlich-himbleeisenbahnwagen- gutenabend-bitte-ein-nurnberger-bratwurstle-gernspurten-mit -zweinmache-luberhundsfut-gumberaber-schonedanker- kalbsfleisch-mitteraucher von Hautkopf of Ulm
If you keep the existing logical network structure, then you'd still need separate aerials, network kit, backhaul links etc. even if the masts were shared. So the savings would be considerably less than claimed.
Even if you went back to the days of (effectively) a single provider (and those old enough to remember the days of GPO telephony will know how well that worked) you would still need to provide nearly as many cells to meet the total capacity, so the savings would be correspondingly reduced.
You might expect that of the Currant Bun, but one would hope for better from the Beeb, who are declaring that worldwide deaths could be as many as 220 million (or as low as 220, but we won't mention that). Their World at One (Radio4) featured a virus 'expert' who declared that the infection "will either plateau out or it will increase dramatically".
No shit, Sherlock.
ISPs have no need for DPI to know which web sites you visit. DPI is needed to decipher the content you exchange (though it's doubtful that even the NSA have the computing power to do that for everyone in the US) and, in particular, where the IP port is obfuscated to disguise traffic such as torrents.
As usual, if you want to exchange data over the Internet that you wouldn't write on the back of a postcard, use encryption. If you don't want folks to know the sites you're visiting, use Tor.
Fundamental particles can be divided into fermions and bosons - fermions are those such as quarks and leptons with half-integer spin that obey the Fermi exclusion principle. The same distinction can also be applied to composite particles, such as protons and neutrons or atomic nuclei like carbon-13 and helium-3, you sum the spins of their components, and if there's an odd half left over they behave as fermions.
So it's quite valid to describe (some isotopes of) strontium as fermions.
"Arctic temperatures are of particular concern to those worried about the effects of global warming, as a melting of the ice cap could lead to disastrous rises in sea level - of a sort which might burst the Thames Barrier and flood London, for instance."
The Arctic ice cap floats, so its melting would have negligible effect on sea levels. Now the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps, on the other hand ...
This may be a plausible view if you've only been exposed to US newspapers. It's true that if you live around New York or LA you have access to reasonable papers, but there's no real national press (unless you count USA Today - I don't).
Here in Blighty we have a choice of 4 national (somewhat) high-brow papers, to suit a range of political views. I buy a paper every day (partly because it's fair value and partly because it's a pain to read it on a PDA) and use PDA versions to check the others if there's a story I'm particularly interested in (or read George Monbiot if I think I'm feeling too cheerful).
Local papers in the UK (with some honourable exceptions) have become advertising-driven free rags, worth every penny.
You're right, IPv6 doesn't improve security. It does, however, make it easier for people to create better security. The security extensions in IPv4 are all optional - you can't rely on the stacks at both ends being able to support signed or encrypted packets, so you may need to install additional software before it will work.
With IPv6 it's all built in and support for encryption, authentication etc is mandatory. Whether or not people will choose to take advantage of this, is another matter.
BTW it's a bit unfair to IBM (I can't believe I just wrote that!) and others in a similar position to claim they're 'sitting' on Class A addresses. As you point out, they're using them internally (quite legitimately). I'm sure if someone was prepared to reimburse them for the costs of moving to 10.0.0.0/8, they'd be prepared to consider doing so. Anyone who's undertaken a transition from public to private IP addresses will know the cost of doing so on a large network is far from trivial.
A fair point. For such attacks to succeed, it requires inadequate input validation at two points: the web interface (allowing XSS and SQL injection attacks) and the underlying DB software (allowing buffer overflow attacks). So, you have two choices to prevent them;
a) wait for Microsoft, Oracle, MySQL etc to produce a database server guaranteed free of buffer overflow vulnerabilities (might be a long wait, and you'd still be vulnerable to XSS); or
b) proper validation of web input strings.
The latter looks more attractive to me given that:
1. It isn't too technically demanding (the most popular web servers provide tools to help, although they aren't 100% effective).
2. It doesn't require a huge effort (given reasonably documented and structured code, admittedly not a very likely contingency :).
3. It protects against XSS as well as SQL injection.
"Birmingham's" MA course. This may lead people to believe that it's associated with a real university rather than a technical college with delusions of adequacy.
My local one offers an MA in "International Football Management" (sadly, I'm not making this up). Loads of job opportunities there, then.
Way off topic, but:
Berliner can mean 'a person from Berlin' or 'a doughnut from Berlin'. It has been argued that prefixing the indefinite article implies the doughnut and so JFK should have said "Ich bin Berliner" just as I would say "Ich bin Englander". No Germans that I've spoken to agree with this interpretation, however.
"Like all American beers, it is gnats pee."
Maybe you haven't been to the states recently. Your statement was true 20 years ago, and remains true for the mega-brewers - Bud, Coors, even Miller (no relation) - but there are lots of microbreweries producing very good beer, they're mostly along the west coast and in the Bos-Wash region, producing bottles (except for the brewhouses) because the US lacks the distribution network for real ales. Their scale is too small for many of them to appear this side of the pond, though I've seen Anchor Steam Beer (somewhat like Ruddles) from San Francisco in my local Waitrose.
"bitter on the customer side (because they get the least amount of service from the vendor to stay in compliance with the contract)"
So Gartner know of outsourcing contracts where the supplier freely delivers service over and above the small print in the contract? Sorry, have to go, I'm being dive-bombed by a squadron of flying pigs.
And that we'd get the innovation of Sun combined with the financial muscle and corporate omnipresence of IBM. Sadly, what usually happens with these M&A deals is that you get the innovation of IBM combined with the financial presence of Sun. IF this goes ahead, I'd bet that in five years' time the question will be 'Sun who?'
Please don't dismiss XSS as a trivial non-event. If you're a bank (are there still any banks?) it's pretty serious. Even if you just require a logon before letting customers download your PDF brochures, you may still be revealing their passwords - and if they use the same passwords for other apps, like 90% of users ...
At the very least you make your organisation look incompetent - the commercial cost of that only you can decide. And where there's an XSS vulnerability, can SQL Injection be far behind?
@DanG: "boarder routers", I think I'll use this alternative spelling from now on.
<insert obligatory "arr-harr, standy by me buckos" comment here>
If you're going to accuse other people of ignorance, it's a good idea to get your own facts straight.
1. Ian Rogers represents a prominent strand of modern theological thought. The original Hebrew text of Isaiah uses a word that can equally well be translated 'virgin' or 'young woman'. Matthew and Luke are keen to present the birth of Jesus as the fulfillment of ancient prohecies and may have over-egged the pudding, so to speak.
2. The Immaculate Conception is sometimes (mistakenly) taken to be equivalent to virgin birth, but in fact is a purely RC doctrine that Mary was conceived free of original sin. Dating back to the 15th century, it became dogma only in the 19th.
Wikipedia has good articles on both these points.
We now return you to our regular programming.
In order to get anywhere close to justifying this pernicious tosh, 'Sir' Liam has to throw in lots of extra 'costs' to society: public drunkenness, deaths and injuries due to driving while intoxicated, family abuse while drunk, etc. The only problem is that, last time I checked, all these were already illegal. Perhaps a case for enforcing existing laws rather than penalise society as a whole? Just a thought.
BTW I love the whole 'passive drinking' thing. A weasel phrase clearly designed to ride on the back of the 'passive smoking' campaign. Watch out for 'inebriation denial', coming your way soon.
Jeez mate, what did Bob do to you - drown your favourite puppy or something?
From where I sit, he invented Ethernet, ripped it from the dead hand of Xerox and turned it into a very successful company (which seems to have been a decent place to work, based on the folks I know that worked there). Either of those would constitute a major achievement for most of us, but then I guess we're not in your class.
OK, he took the money and ran, but rather than buy a small Caribbean island he still involves himself in the industry. What's so wrong with that?
.. and if you swap the battery, then the exhausted battery still needs to be recharged. You can either do this on site or have a massive central recharging plant (probably sited next to a power station). In the latter case you've got to include the cost of transporting all these used batteries, so I guess you're no further forward. In either case, the resulting energy demands are unrealistic IMHO.
Any 'green' transport system that wouldn't drastically curtail people's ability to travel has to address the problem of energy density. Batteries and capacitors are still a long way behind kerosene in this respect.
Environmentalists need to either:
a) invent a way of producing petroleum (or something very similar) in a sustainable fashion; or else
b) figure out how to convince everyone that when they want to travel 100 miles to visit their mum, they'll need to book their trip with the authorities three months in advance (good luck with that).
You ain't kidding. My 'local supermarket' filling station is nearly always busy from 7am-7pm and opens 24 hrs. Let's suppose an average of 15 'filling up' during peak periods and 5 overnight. That means we 'only' need a supply that can average 5MW. But we would need a 'battery' that can hold 30MWh (or 110GJ if you prefer). That's about 50,000 standard lead-acid car batteries.
Thanks and well done, that all looks very plausible.
If you think about it though, a filling station where every vehicle takes 10 minutes to fill up would need to be able to service at least 8 (my village petrol station has 8 pumps) and for a larger establishment 20 (my local supermarket) recharging operations simultaneously. That takes us up to 10MW for every Tesco in the country.
Put your money into wind turbines, folks (or, more likely, copper for all the new cabling that will be needed).
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