Another issue

Make sure you know what happens if a small (one-bit? one-block?) error develops in your [GTP]bytes of encrypted backup media. Do you lose one bit ot one block when you restore? Or does the whole darned thing become un-decypherable and therefore useless?

This backup has had its pin pulled and will self-destruct ten minutes before you need it. (Schrodinger's cat would be a better icon. Backups are simultaneously live and dead and you don't know which until you try to restore them)

Why no dye bomb?

I still don't understand why cash dispensers are the least bit attractive to thieves.

Surely they should be designed with a large dye-bomb inside, that goes off should a cable connecting the cash dispenser to the foundations of the building be cut. Banknotes saturated with dye are pretty much impossible to spend, so after word got out, thieves would leave all cash-dispensers alone.

In fact inside a cash-dispenser, it' would probably be safe to use concentrated sulphuric acid instead of dye, which would turn banknotes into acid-charcoal slurry.

Bright sunshine stops reader

E-book fails

1. Openness. I want to be sure I can always read my book, or lend it or sell it on to or give it to someone else.

2. Water (and salt and food and sand) tolerance of a paper book is superior to that of any electronic device I know.

3. Books don't have battery-life issues

4. Books reliably last decades (centuries if printed on acid-free paper).

5. Less hassles at airport security with a paper book, and no risk that it might be infected with a virus or hidden content or have its visible content altered.

6. You can still read a damaged paper book (and mend it with sticky tape).

7. Ipad or any other display I've seen is not comfortable to read in bright sun. E-paper (as in Kindle) an exception, but lacks colour and mouse-clickability.

Non-fails: I find a book created as, say, a pdf file with hyperlinked index is slightly better for non-linear access than a paper book (just as long as I have the appropriate means to read it to hand). Annotation *ought* to be a small matter of programming.

Rubber grommets better than tonnes of iron?

Some quiet PC enclosures have vibration isolation - rubber grommets or springs - on the disk mounts, to prevent the noise of the disk drive coupling into the case and causing acoustic annoyance. Such isolation must also work in the other direction, and attenuate any forced vibration of the disk drive by the chassis. Some benchmarking please. Are quiet PCs also faster PCs?

Anyway, if drives being vibrated by their chassis is a problem, it's surely a much better solution to float each drive on vibration-deadening rubber mounts, than spending a fortune on heavyweight ironmongery.

The thing that I know does cause systems to slow down is being too warm (or cold). A drive outside its manufacturer's recommended operating temperature range may have a shortened life expectancy, but definitely suffers degraded seek times while it is operating outside spec.

Study problems

If you ask a bunch of people who have developed brain cancer about their mobile phone usage over the previous several years, they will of course tend to over-estimate. The control group, without brain cancer, may well under-estimate. The resulting bias could easily invalidate the study to the extent that it looks as if mobiles protect one against brain cancer!

Then there's the issue of dosage. Depending on *where* you use your mobile, it may be transmitting at two watts (one bar reception) or two milliwatts (four bars). It's pretty obvious to me that if there is a risk, it will be to the folks who make heavy use of their mobiles in places with bad reception. Are they able to allow for that in these studies? I doubt it.

I suspect that the mobile companies actually have the data to do a definitive study. Their location data may well even allow for reasonably accurate estimation of transmission power for each call. But put together commercial self-interest and data privacy laws, and will they hand over their data? Barring specific legislation, not a chance.

Finally, the obvious. There's no epidemic of brain cancer out there. The risk, if non-zero, is small. If you are paranoid, look at your signal-strength indicator and don't make or take calls when it's poor. Otherwise, just watch out for buses -- probably a greater risk than mobiles if you are talking on your mobile while you cross the road!

Hidden in plain sight?

There is always the possibility that it is not what it at first sight appears, that it is in fact a steganographically concealed or prearranged signal to agent(s) unknown. The fact that it has been sent to untold millions of others is of course cover for the agents.

So it could be quite clever, not at all stupidous.

Able was I ...

Windows XP can now share an epitaph with Napoleon Bonaparte

Able was I ere I saw ELBA

"Some people don't want servers, even if they need them".

Or, they've worked out that "entry-level server" means sluggish PC packed with industry-incompatible hardware that's supposed to be more reliable, but which in practice is guaranteed to break down a few days after the warranty runs out, and which then cannot be repaired for less han the cost of a new entry-level server, and a ten-day wait for the spare part. Oh yes, and an extra £500 up front for the privilege. And extra-noisy fans.

Better to buy a good industry-standard desktop system with twin RAID-1-able disks and call it your server. With the cash you've saved you could buy another one and keep it a cupboard as your cold fail-over. Or just grab a spare part out of the office junior's desktop should you ever need it .

They'd like you to think that what you've just read is highly technical content. (The scary thing is that for so many people, it is).

Internet II?

> The six were then tasked with creating a dynamic database to coordinate the spectrum uses of at least 20 separate emergency service groups in an apocalyptic urban setting. The database was required to sense users, and deduce transmitter locations as well the as signalling systems used, identifying available frequencies for allocation to new arrivals and working out the potential for interference based on both the frequencies and the manner in which they are used.

Tell them that all they have is a hammer, and the problem has to look like a nail.

Wasn't the original design brief for the internet that it survive a nuclear war? Pretty much the same scenario.

I'd envisage a decentralized and self-organising cellular network. Plane-loads of solar-powered base stations, every one programmed to establish communications with its neighbours, create their own network maps, and to service any compatible handsets that arrive. You could have the network up and running within a few hours, parachuting the base stations from planes (or helicopters). Local hotspots without enough bandwidth? Same as mobiles - parachute in more base-stations, the cells automagically get smaller.

Hard to do if access permissions and communications privacy are issues, but in this disaster-response scenario they aren't. (And I thought that the military had already got something like this *with* security, for battlefield and/or post-EMP communications).

Of course, someone has to do the design work now, and stockpile the things in advance. Which they haven't done. Perhaps the problem will look like a nail after all.

Cheap and simple

Store all data printed on the passport in digital form within the passport. Store a crypto-checksum of that digital data in a passport verification database. Passports can then be verified. To the extent that a passport-forger has not obtained write access to the master checksum database, no faked passport will pass verification. What more is needed?

Since there's no personal information stored in the verification database there are no security issues. The verification database can be made public- just a list of passport numbers and their checksums, not even our names need be in it.

15 watts on standby?!

What on earth does it do with FIFTEEN WATTS while standing by? My old 1980s Phillips TV stands by on just three watts (which I regard as three too many).

We really need some EU-wide legislation on standby power usage, to force manufacturers to get standby power usage down to milliwatt levels. Hint: disconnect the switch-mode PSU *completely* from the mains, and run standby functions off a rechargeable battery which recharges every time you turn the set on.

Another defense mechanism

No-one has mentioned H G Wells "The war of the Worlds". I suspect that should biological aliens arrive on another planet with biology, there are only three possible outcomes, none good:

1. Their microbes overcome our immune systems and reduce the Earth's biosphere to goo.

2. Our microbes overcome their immune systems and reduce the invaders to goo. Their home planet likewise, if any make it back home.

3. Both of the above, followed by a very long war (hundreds of millions of years, or billions) while two competing microbial biosystems evolove their way to victory or a peace treaty (symbiosis).

But of course, the real universe appears to have a speed-of-light limit. Perhaps we should be thankful for that. I suspect interstellar travel has to wait until biological life works out how to upload itself into robotic bodies. At that point they can go exploring, by slowing their clocks down enough to make interstellar journeys tolerably short in subjective time.

Post-biological life plausibly poses no threat to us, because it will prefer vacuum (almost all the universe) to nasty corrosive biospheres (a negligibly small part), and the tops of gravity wells to the bottoms. It might even be here already, if it's ethical enough to leave primitive bio-life alone and just watch our evolution quietly from the comfort of the asteroid belt!

The nasty alternative -- exponential growth, conversion of every solar system it reaches into smart matter, etc. -- can probably be ruled out in this galactic heighbourhood by astronomical observation. We'd have noticed mature stars surrounded by smart-matter dust clouds that should not be there, and most especially a patch of all-atypical stars characteristically different from the rest of the galaxy.

Love it?

"not that Londoners love it".

That's a bit harsh. It's hard to love something that exists to take one's money for the purpose of paying for transport. But that fundamental aside, it's a darned sight more convenient than the paper tickets it replaced. It would be even more useful if it could be used as an instant cash substitute for coffees, sandwiches, confectionery etc.

For accuracy, there is a choice - paper tickets still exist. However, they do cost more. Better to invest in a spare anonymous Oyster cashcard (all of £3, refundable) should you ever make journeys that you don't want Big Brother to log to your ID. I keep a couple lying around for a different reason - for use by friends and family visiting me in London.

Forget left-right

There's very little to distinguish Labour from Tories on the old, dead left-right apolitical axis.

What we might see here, is the opening up of some very clear differences between the two on the ever more important Libertarian - Authoritarian axis. Labour want everything regulated and controlled by the dead hand of government. Perhaps the Tories really don't.

I'm not cynical enough to dismiss these ideas out od hand as just more politicians promises. Even if they let us down on some specifics, they'll have my qualified support just as long as they really do act to get government off our backs.

It couldn't have happened with VMS

Some may think this a small point, but other industries have realized the importance of intrinsically safe design, and over the decades and centuries they have pushed unsafe designs onto the scrap-heap. The computer industry has a long way to go -- in many areas we don't even know what intrinsically safe really means.

But in the namespace of a filesystem, allowing special shell characters and control codes as part of filenames is intrinsically very unsafe. A filename ought to be a string with a defined maximum length, and each byte restricted to a set of non-special characters (typically 0-9, A-Z,a-z, underscore and hyphen).

Unix has cursed the world with a few serious mistakes, and unrestricted strings of bytes as filenames is one of them.

Left - Right is dead

Whether you support Labour or the Tories, they're both clearly in favour of authoritarian big government, and there's really not a lot else to choose between them. That's the message that the Tories have just sent us.

The new political axis is authoritarian / libertarian. What this country desperately needs is a truly libertarian party, and for it to be elected while we still have some vestiges of democratic government to save. Leave the current political parties to continue down their chosen road for another couple of decades, and we won't.

Boggle

Doesn't this make it illegal for a young artist and lover (legal: age 16-18) to make drawings from life of his or her partner? Boggle. You may legally have carnal knowledge, but you may not draw.

Really?

I know it's a real problem with a real BT installation, but if this line was not added by the Reg for comic effect, it's proof that the gods have a sense of humour

A blaze at Burne House in North Paddington was reported this morning.

Next, a report from BT that they have suffered a second whammy because their national emergency backup centre at Loudwater was flooded early this morning.

Prediction

the DA-notice will be responded to by takedown of this article at 20100401 12:00:00.01

Trained reflexes?

We can (almost) all walk and chew gum at the same time. Most can walk and think (or converse) at the same time. But more than a few of us have had the experience that while thinking hard about one thing, our feet have taken us along the path of habit, rather than the one intended.

Some activities are largely or exclusively trained reflexes. Walking is one such: conscious input is needed only to set the destination, if it's a route that you've travelled very many times. I suspect that for some people more than others, driving is another such activity.

An interesting proof of how this works can be offered by physiotherapists. An injury may train you to walk or run differently. When the injury has fully healed, one's reflexes may stay differently-trained. A physio's job may be to provide conscious input and/or to devise exercises to force a patient's reflexes back to the more efficient "normal" pattern, away from the ones "trained" by the injury.

So, do "supertaskers" have an above-average ability (or tendency) to delegate routine matters to their subconscious, which routinely looks after many things simultaneously?

And the other 6%?

Have they considered the six percent who won't be able to receive DAB? (By their own figures).

It would be bad enough if these people were evenly spread across the country, but they won't be. They'll be concentrated in sparsely populated rural parts. In certain MPs constituencies, they'll be a majority. About time to start raising awareness of this issue amongst these MPs, so that they can't say that they didn't know?

BTW, I've tried DAB in a car, and it simply doesn't work. By that I mean it cannot handle driving through patches of bad radio quality with sufficient grace to be listen-able. So as well as rural constituents, there will be a huge backlash if the FM service is ever turned off. Better to start by going back to the drawing board, to invent a more robust digital transmission format for transmitting to moving vehicles.

Not really what I'd call a fake CPU

It's not really a fake CPU because it doesn't work at all. It's just a criminal scam to defraud a distributor.

What would be a fake CPU, would be if someone was scraping the product ID off a cheap CPU and relabelling it as an expensive one, then selling that to unsuspecting customers in fake packaging. If the customer never checked the BIOS, they might never notice that the reason their i7-970 was disappointing was because it was actually a -920.

Anyone remember a few years back when organised crime relabelled a huge bunch of cheap electrolytic capacitors as the expensive high-performance ones for use in CPU voltage regulation circuitry? They worked for 2-3 years before leaking brown corrosive gunk, at which time the motherboard died. The criminals were long gone before the manufacturers spotted the problem. One estimate was that 50 million mobos / PCs went to an early grave.

Why no dye bomb?

Will someone please tell me why cash machines do not contain a dye bomb, prevented from release by a cable attached to the building? This has long been a feature of attache cases containing bearer documents or cash, attached to the courier's wrist. Snatch the case, and both contents and snatchers are instantly soaked with indelible violet dye.

After a few raiders discovered the hard way that all you get is un-spendable purple-stained banknotes, a bill for new clothes, and a need to stay out of the public eye until their purple-dyed skin is shed, then no-one would ever bother a cash-machine again.

What have I missed?

Er...

Anyone else thinking "Rampant Rabbit"?