Posts by Pete 2

That sound you can hear ...

> TV technology was obvious a big talking point

.. is the world saying "Meh!".

Nobody cares about TV tech. Nobody, that is, apart from individuals who use the size of their equipment as a measure of, well, the size of their equipment and those locked in development labs producing ever-denser, more responsive, brighter, bigger, bendier displays - that will still be showing the same repeats (some in B&W, witness True Ents screening The Avengers, right back from 1965) that were not even new a generation ago.

Let's face it: we have enough TV. There's such a large back catalog that there is little need for anyone to make any more telly (apart from filling the gap left by expunging 1970's "non-persons" from ToTP repeats, and updating the few true science documentaries as better information becomes available) - as all the channels of 100% repeats show us, all too successfully with their ability to compete with the big-4 channels for audience share.

So if there's no need for more content, and we can easily satisfy the current generation and ones to come with the existing, already paid-for, known to be popular programmes - why would anyone need a bigger, better, bendier telly to watch it. It's not as if the medium has any affect on the message.

Facebookification

> what really sets a film apart is the number of times it's later referenced in other moving pictures.

So basically, all they are doing is counting the number of "likes" a movie gets from other film-makers.

And as for "a good measure of scientific citations", haven't the journals been counting and indexing citations since, well, forever? Though it may be that Google's indexing algorithm (giving more weight to references from well-referenced papers) is a better plan - rather than just tallying up the totals.

Keep looking in the mirror

It's very handy when you're backpedalling.

(and so far as FB's value goes, considering the massive number of "workers" - maybe "employees" would be a better word - who seem to spend all their time on it, shouldn't FB's global economic value be negative $227Bn?)

newtabpage still borked

With older versions of FF (e.g. 31) when you opened a new tab you could configure the browser to show you a grid of "favourite" website thumbnails to click on. By default this was set to a 3x3 matrix - but could be changed to show more sites in more rows and/or columns, albeit with smaller thumbnails of each one.

In FF34 this feature was "improved" to fix the grid to 3x3, no matter what about:config parameter the user set. In FF35 Mozilla have applied their infinite wisdom and decided that users should want LARGE thumbnails, rather than to allow the users to choose smaller ones but more of them. So now it *is* possible to have more columns (maybe even more rows, too - but I don't have a screen large enough) but the size of each thumbnail is fixed, irrespective of the size or resolution of the screen I have.

You can't get to there from here

> The station is split into two sectors: the Russian segment and the United States segment

So, which segment has access to the escape pod?

Consumption is not the same as production

The basic fallacy behind comparing PC use to oil consumption is that the model IS fundamentally different; PCs were (are?) subject to the "law" of mass-production: the more things that are made, the cheaper they become. Whereas oil production - from whatever source - is subject to supply and demand: the more something is consumed, the higher it's price becomes.

Now it might be convenient, as a prop for the "Rise of the ManufRacturers" to assume that:

> There's simply no shortage at all of shales to exploit around the world

However, that statement is clearly bollocks. Even if there was a (practically, if not physically) infinite supply of fossil fuel there is still geopolitical issues that limits its distribution: someone can turn off the tap - just ask Mr. Putin. There is also the factor of what to do with the emissions from burning this stuff: even if climate change is "questionable" now, once a proportion of this "no shortage" oil shale disappears into our air it will alter that questionability and/or lead to air pollution of unacceptable levels.

We could also discuss the effect of transportation costs (oil, being sucked out of the ground is, essentially, free. But the cost of getting it to the end user is high. Whereas PCs have substantial production / software costs and transport adds little to that) on the different markets. Also that PCs are not in themselves a desirable "good" - they are merely a platform for the software we wish to run on them and unlike oil don't have any viable alternatives for their use.

Making a splash

> 11 videos viewed for every person on the planet

Remind me never, ever to buy a second-hand mobile device!

(or to borrow anyone's phone)

The 4K elephant in the room

Modern houses are small - modern flats are tiny.

While you can fit a normal sized HDTV in a room, once you get to the size of screen needed to gain any benefit from 4K: with double the number of pixels in each direction, there aren't that many places in yer average sitting room where you can put it. And if you want to sit at a comfortable viewing distance (which increases with screen size) - fewer still.

A 4-foot wide 55 inch telly dominates a modern living room. Given that you have one wall taken up with windows, an adjacent one with a door slapped somewhere near the middle and need to have your seats opposite the TV - there aren't that many layout options available. Put in a 60-incher and you find that the TV dominates the room. Go larger and the whole thing looks like a caricature. Stick with a 4K TV that's the same size as your existing HD kit and what have you gained for all the extra cost?

(and they still only show the same old crappy programmes)

Apple gets the pip

So since the BBC has "unmasked" Apple as not an ethical employer, should we expect all the trendy BBC staff to eschew their Macs, iPads and iPhones either as a matter of corporate policy or simply as individual choices made on humanitarian grounds?

Or is it more likely that there is a wide gap between the principles and standards promoted in an investigative entertainment programme and the reality of what should not get between right-on media luvvies and their status symbols.

Who fancies organising a mass iBurning outside Media City? It might even make the ITV news.

How about ...

> Imagine the Revolution¹ guys being able to react to the 4p porridge story and getting something out on the day

Here's a better idea: Imagine the BBC guys being able to research the 4p porridge story [ whatever that is/was ] and getting an authoritative, credible, accurate and structured story out, assuming the story had relevance to the TV audience

Then the channel might actually be worth watching and could support a viewership that made its funding cost effective.

[1] what or whoever TF they are.

Crims today - no forward thinking.

Personally, if I was ever to defraud a company of $1.4 Bil, I'd make sure I kept enough cash squirreled away to buy the best lawyers, accountants and judges possible to keep me out of jail if the dastardly deed was ever discovered.

> Europe’s new digital chief’s passion for ending geo-blocking has been explained: he’s missing out on his beloved Estonian football. ... I find it’s blocked, blocked, blocked!”

Well, yes. That's the thing about other countries. Why does he assume that doing this is "stealing", when he reckons that paying his (Estonian) licence / taxes should entitle him to watch the programmes he wants to?

BTW, there are more ways than setting up a VPN.

Quids pro me

> it costs companies over £30 a month to maintain an employee’s phone

So could one reasonably expect (say) £25 a month for relieving the company of this expensive burden and using my own phone?

More for the spam filter

> I found an angry set of demands for my time and attention. Nothing serious, certainly nothing that could qualify as an emergency

Sounds like you have some more people to cut ties with. Either can them or throw together an autoresponder that says: "Have you tried switching it off and on again?".

Director of gubbins

The role of the directors is twofold.

First, to have a plan for the future of the business (which could include fixing any existing problems) and to be able to communicate that plan to the senior managers who's job it is to execute the plan. Directors aren't the "do-ers", they express a wish and others are resonsible for carrying it out. If you ever see a director of IT doing a technical job, something has gone terribly wrong.

Second, to be responsible both to the shareholders and the law for the operations of the company. As it turns out, large companies have many IT related legal obligations (security and protection of data being just one). However, it's not the job of an IT director to specify the "how" - that's too low-level - they specify the "what" and leave the "how" up to the minions, but with final say over all and any proposed solutions.

As such, it makes complete sense for an IT director to be only partially IT-savvy. Just as you don't expect a Network Manager to know about the header fields in an Ethernet packet. An IT director needs to work at the "block" level of infrastructure: a computer centre here, a D.R. site there. And to be aware of which directions the industry is moving in, in order to increase the IT value to the company: do we stick with our own operations, or do we outsource? do we put everything in the cloud?

However, since practically everything in a commercial organisation is money-driven, it's not unreasonable for an IT director to be better at doing spreadsheets than installing Linux.

Join the dots

A series of connected straight lines?

Not so much art as a diagram. Maybe this isn't the earliest form of art, but the earliest form of a diagram. Homo erectus could have been an engineer.

Who?

> SUPER-SUEBALL heading IBM's way

makes you wonder whether Sue Ball has ever contemplated tossing around a few sueballs of her own for all the bad press she gets?

On the bright side

> such expensive luxuries as welfare states and pensioners, proper healthcare (watch out for that pandemic), reasonable public services, affordable manufactured goods and transport, decent personal hygiene,

That scenario sounds like it would lead to a dramatic decrease in life expectancy, greater susceptibility to life-threatening diseases and accidents and an increase in infant mortality. So the logical conclusion would be that the number of people on the planet would drop - which would reduce the need for energy: whether renewable or not, hence lowering the drivers of climate change.

Isn't that the plan?

Professionalism by degrees

Getting a degree is a good first step. But that's all it is. It tells potential employers nothing about the practical skills, professionalism, integrity or experience of a candidate.

As such, employing people in something as critical as IT security based on such a basic qualification is asking for trouble. There is already an organisation in the UK that provides a sort of professional qualification and sets standards for its members, but the British Computer Society never seems to get a mention when talking about such things. Is the failing theirs, in not pushing and publicising their role - or is it that IT isn't really a "profession": just a series of "jobs" strung together, more or less, into a career?

There is obviously a need for something "above and beyond" a BSc or MSc and it could be argued that membership of a chartered institute would fulfill that requirement. After all it appears to be a necessary requirement for proper architects and other "real" professionals.

So instead of trying a DIY approach of setting up single solutions at various academic institutions, shouldn't the government be addressing the problem of getting suitable security professions at a much higher level, and breaking with IT tradition by mandating a truly professional qualification?

Lesson from Yes Minister

"We should always tell the press freely and frankly anything that they could easily find out for themselves"

And so it so with governments - or their security services (the EU drawing a distinction between them: the governing body and their member states' security strikes me as a little odd and rather clueless). Any terrorists entering the EU should be willing to give the security services a name, an itinery and as many phone numbers and email addresses as they think will make them happy. But our overlords and protectors shouldn't be surprised that if they call the number given to arrange a dawn raid and to make sure the address they were given is correct, that the number turns out to be the head of MI6, or their own mother's.

Giving this sort of information to the spooks will not help them. No self-respecting terrorist (well: one who hopes or expects to walk away from an "incident") would give up the goods that easily and therefore the only data they will collect will be from harmless individuals and private citizens with no nefarious intent.

Simple really

> It is a question of do you trust us

As a pseudo-equation, it's reasonable to think in terms of:

Trust = truth * time

So when we start hearing some truth, we'll start to give some trust .... in time.

Too many words

> "Why should I use SSDs?"

Ans: because they're faster. Next question please.

Seriously, the reason people buy SSDs is the need for speed. Since they passed the threshold price (which is different for everyone: and we're talking home users here) it became apparent that unless you have a burning desire to record and keep for posterior every single episode of East Enders or you have a porn collection of willy-withering proportions, then the need for terabytes of storage or home NAS's is largely driven by marketing (and the fact that the disk manufacturers have to keep the unit price high, hence increased capacities).

And even if you do need the odd 50 Gig for some purpose, it's a trivial matter to whip out a 64GB thumb drive and put your big stuff on that. Who knows, some strange people might even use them for backups. That way you can lose your entire life's work by accidentally dropping a USB drive down the lav'.

Even Windows 8.1 leaves oodles of free space, even on a 40GB SSD and with most people leaving their email in the cloud those loving missives from Aunty Flo, replete with humungous videos of her pu cat can be viewed with no hit on the home front. And if you do need more storeage: USB drives are frighteningly large, these days.

Still playing favourites

> the differences in code quality between languages are pretty small

Maybe so. But what about the differences in (language) learning time, ease of code development, the size of the executable and the speed it runs?

It's also arguable that people who were taught one programming style will be more comfortable and produce better product when using languages which conform to that technique than if they are made to use a different, possibly merely more trendy, method of turning letters into bits.

It would also be instructive to see whether the IDE (or lack thereof) used, or different coverage/testing techniques employed by different programmers contributed to the buginess of the end result.

No matter how good / bad the language: the crucial difference is always the quality, documentation and extent of the supporting libraries and and learning material.

Writing in Code

I watched the first episode of The Code. It was slightly less fun than reading the man page for EMACS

Follow the money

> the first [ part of the law ] allows (AEDE) to charge content aggregators for any snippets they publish

The basic problem is that there are few european democracies that are as inept as Spain in passing laws. Most laws there seem to either be simple revenue raising efforts that punish successful businesses, or "favours" to the government's brown-envelope-toting friends to nobble competition. Either way, little or no thought is given to the side-effects or unintended consequences of their enforcement. Alternatively they simply aren't enforced at all - or the imposed fines merely achieve the status of another tax on people or businesses.

Just like Hungary quickly canned their plans to tax the internet, I can't see Spain getting any benefit from this lark.

Wotta lotta pixels

So what could you actually display on a 5K monitor that wouldn't be as good on a 4K one?

Well, the obvious answer for the average user is images from a 5K camera (and possibly the only answer: since video refreshes at rates that make seeing each pixel impractical - not to mention impossible, and once you can read a piece of text at a reasonably sharp definition, adding more hi-def. doesn't make it any better or easier to read - otherwise nobody would be able to use "old" 27-inch 1920x1080 screens to do that).

So still images it is. But wait! Even if you take an image from your DSLR, hasn't it been de-bayered inside the camera (and squished around to turn it into JPEG), so it's not exactly WYSIWYG any more. Going further: if you choose to take a squint at the RAW format, the camera still has an anti-aliasing filter in front of the sensor to reduce all those nasty Moire patterns. So you aren't even seeing the real image then, either - TIFF, JPEG or not.

Data independence

Others here have mentioned Russian gas as being a strategic weakness for Europeans and those within the Russian "sphere". America has laws against exporting oil extracted from the USA in order to protect its supply.

Similarly, India has announce that it is planning a (country-wide) GPS system so it's not subject to the whims of a foreign power. Europe is building the Galileo system and independence may be one of the reasons (though you can never tell with Brussels-originated schemes what the hell they are for).

The reason that Brazil (a Portuguese-speaking country) would want its own direct connection to another part of the Portuguese speaking world (viz. Portugal) doesn't have to be about cost - countries spend a great deal of money on "soft power" and building ties with their allies and $180Mil would just about buy you one shiny new fighter aircraft.

So it's not an unreasonable thing to do. It strengthens bonds, adds some self-reliance, gives a powerful northern neighbour something to think about and might even reduce ping-times to Portugal and the rest of Europe. If you're doing financial deals that alone could be worth the cost (there was a new cable laid across the Atlantic a few years ago that paid for itself by cutting 6mSec off traders latency).

The canary?

> sites unexpectedly patched to Drupal version 7.32 could indicate compromise

So should we assume that while Drupal sites have *not* been upgraded to 7.32, that they haven't been hacked (yet)?

Oddly for such a "catastrophic" bug, 1 2 3 4 5 ... all but 1 site on the first 2 pages of the Drupal showcase website (that still exist, or still run Drupal) runs an outdated version.

Version checker:

http://www.whitefirdesign.com/tools/drupal-version-check.html