Posts by Kubla Cant
712 posts • joined Monday 28th June 2010 14:47 GMT
“vehicle cybersecurity”
That horse has well and truly bolted already. A while ago, El Reg reported on a fascinating paper describing how researchers attached a radio device to a car's system bus and were able to take control of anything. In theory there's supposed to be security separating the safety-critical systems from things like the radio, but they found that it was easily circumvented, and that they were able to take over the brakes and accelerator of a moving car.
You only have to spend some time with the UI of a car's computer to realise that it was designed by people who are new to this sort of thing, and probably more at home with nuts and bolts.
Re: So here is the question-
My recollection is that if you have the debugger enabled in IE, it offers to debug any site with errors (maybe that's just script errors).
This is especially annoying, as few sites are completely error-free. If you're working on cross-browser pages, especially if you're targeting earlier versions of IE, then you'll certainly have the IE debugger enabled because IE is where your bugs will be.
A good approximation to hell is trying to debug client script on IE6 using its so-called debugger. It generally terminates with a stack dump on good days, or a BSOD on bad ones.
Re: The perfect gift . . .
[tm registered to Coca Cola]
Unlikely. When Coca Cola launched a bottled water brand in Britain it was soon revealed that the contents were actually tap water, from Surbiton, if I remember correctly. It wasn't long after that that the brand was withdrawn.
Piece of cake
So all they have to do on Mars is find a zinc and copper mine 1.5 miles deep, get to the bottom in one piece, then drill boreholes. Should be a piece of cake for the Curiosity rover.
Re: Charger...
Why does a dog lick his balls?
Because he can.
Who won?
It was a meeting of Star Wars enthusiasts. Nobody won: they were all losers.
Re: “advance the bold vision”
you can rely on people's ability to discern pictures more quickly than words
Can you cite any reliable evidence for this? It seems to be widely believed, but personally I doubt it.
The process of see word->read word->associate with concept is complicated and hard to understand, but it's very well-trained in literate people. It's fast enough to allow assimilation of pages of text at an average rate of one word every quarter second.
In the case of pictures, the idea is that process is more like see image->associate image with concept. The trouble is that the relationship between a picture and a concept is far vaguer than that between a word and a concept, so the second step in the process is slow, and may require some sort of probabilistic filtering produce an unambiguous result. This is one of the reasons why alphabetic writing displaced pictograms.
I get very annoyed with instruction leaflets that decide to set the clock back 47 centuries and communicate entirely in pictures. In the case of taskbar buttons, I find I often click one with the wrong icon but similar colours to the one I want, and I don't find a blue elephant to be the obvious symbol for a database.
Road signs are probably the exception, because they use a small set of images and you're obliged to learn what they mean, but even then some of the more obscure road signs require a lot of mental gear-churning before you can be certain what they mean.
Re: I'm not sure what the point it.
Whitney was right "The children are our future"
What did Pratt say?
Tax exemption???
I thought the whole point of the rule of law, democracy etc, etc was that laws apply equally to everyone. But it seems that we're still in the 17th Century, where monopolies, subsidies and tax exemptions are handed out on an arbitrary basis by politicians.
Why hasn't Arqiva been broken up as a monopoly? They've invested in infrastructure, but it's not like mobile telephony is a socially valuable service that wouldn't be available without subsidy, is it?
It would be interesting to learn who else is tax-exempt.
Feeding insects to cattle
What could possibly go wrong? It was fine when we fed sheep, etc*, to cattle, after all.
*etc: At the time of the BSE outbreak, I worked for a company that supplied (reputable) cattle feed ingredients as part of its business. It was known that some farmers were adding cement to their feed - presumably to stiffen up the dead sheep brains.
Re: bon apitite....
"apitite"?
"ice burg"?
If you want to be taken seriously, you should consider investing in a dictionary.
Re: Apple are not the only ones
I too have one of the old A4-sheet driving licences. It's lived in my wallet since 1999, so it's in a pretty ragged state. I ought to charge wear and tear to anyone who asks to see it without good reason. My objective is to avoid the cost / time / hassle of getting a plastic one for as long as possible.
Re: Killjoy statistician Nazi here
European attitudes to all rules and regulations, including H&S, seem to be like this:
- For the Germans, any rule is a good rule. The more stringent and unreasonable, the better. Zu Befehl! I am only following orders, etc.
- For the Club Med countries, rules are suggestions that we might follow if it doesn't interfere in any way with our lifestyle.
- For the British, rules are things to worry about.
@Zmodem
lose
lose
LOSE
LOSE
Conferencing
The last office I worked in used desktop-sharing software (Bridgit and something else) that integrated nicely with the desktop phones. You could join a conference on the computer and get it to call your phone, whereupon it would show who was dialled-in and who was talking.
The audio quality was obviously too good, though, because most cofnerences were punctuated by the manager saying "Somebody's breathing into the phone - please mute it!".
Of course the handsets were covered in buttons with no discernible function, but that's the way handsets always are. How many home phones have buttons that seem to assume everybody has a PABX?
How?
able to connect to the internet via a local network, and use Micro SD cards for storage
I know nothing about the C64, but given its age I would be surprised to learn that it runs an operating system with either of these capabilities. I suppose it might be possible to emulate a cassette recorder with SD cards (the emulator will need to run very slowly and fail on a random basis). But is he planning to write his own network stack in Basic?
@Montreal Sam
Her response was "Go out and find one of these women and sleep with her then."
And did you?
Re: @"nations that are run by sexually repressed religious nut bags."
@Drakkenson: Brush up your predicate logic.
"most nations that disapprove of facial hair are run by sexually repressed religious nut bags" does not imply "a particular nation (or even most nations) run by sexually repressed religious nut bags disapproves of facial hair".
∀a(MustShave(a) → RunByNuts(a))
is consistent with
∃a(RunByNuts(a) ∧¬ MustShave(a))
(Why can I paste these symbols into the message, but not enter them as HTML entities?)
Re: I will never understand...
@The Grump: I take it from the way you spell "flavor" that you're a native of the country that specialises in flavourless beers, served so cold that any vestigial taste is undetectable.
Re: Decisive action and commitment
@Phil W: "phasing out passports as they expire"
- so we'd only be able to travel to countries that don't require a passport?
Meanwhile on planet Earth...
As a contractor I imagine I see the inside of more offices than many other people. What I see is people working at large desktop workstations with the biggest screens they can get. I'm looking at two wide screens, the person sitting next to me has three, and at my last place of work there were people with nine screens. You'd need a van to get the stuff home.
OK, let's leave aside these power users and look at low-paid clerical workers. At the moment they usually have a box under the table, a moderate-size screen, a keyboard and mouse. It's still a lot of kit to carry back and forth on the bus.
I guess the presumption of BYOD is that all this work will be taking place on portable devices. The accounts clerk will be using spreadsheets on her smartphone, and the secretaries will be hammering out letters on fondleslabs. Does Gartner have anything to say about the 90% drop in productivity that will result?
Re:
I bet it can't walk on the ceiling, either.
Re: Re: No network = No Work
I'm wrong. Just re-read and seen that the network ports are taped up.
So it's back to sneakernet.
Re: No network = No Work
@keithpeter No Internet != no network
Posted in Yet another Cabinet-level ID card farce
Here comes Godwin
One problem is that identity documents are so strongly associated with films of Anton Diffring in a long black leather overcoat shouting "Ausweis! Schnell!".
Posted in Star Trek: The original computer game
The original computer game?
Not even near. When I read that part of the ancestry of Star Trek was a game called Space Wars, it reminded me that I'd read about an earlier game with a similar name. It seems that Spacewar! is no relation to Star Trek, but it's much, much earlier.
According to a "reliable source", Spacewar! was written in 1962, on a PDP-1 (I never knew there was such a computer, though it makes sense that DEC didn't start from number 8. Were there ever PDPs 2-7?)
While I'm writing, is "numberical" a word you made up?
The big difference is this
All the identifying documents I have at the moment are things that enable me to prove who I am, that I can drive, that I have a line of credit, that I shop at Tesco, that anyone who messes with me is going to hear from Her Britannic Majesty's Secretary of State, etc. I have them because I think the loss of anonymity is worth the benefit (or in the case of Tesco, I don't because I don't).
The ID card, on the other hand, was going to be something we were all required by law to own and to carry.
Re: ah, schoolday 'pranks'
Not to mention:
- Sugar and weedkiller, but not in small tins. The class pyromaniac favoured lengths of bicycle frame with the ends beaten over.
- Potassium permanganate and glycerine, inside an empty desk. Began to burn about halfway through the lesson.
- Acetylene from calcium carbide dropped into a bottomless oil can standing in water, then ignited through the hole in the top. Amazingly, in the 1960s bike shops still stocked calcium carbide for people to use in cycle lamps.
- Iodine and ammonia. Anywhere.
It sounds like Bash Street, but this was a grammar school in what was, according to New Society, the most middle-class town in Britain.
Posted in Linux kernel 3.9 lands
@1Rafayal
MS has some advantages, they make a product and let people know all about it and offer help on how to use it.
Microsoft offers help on how to use Windows? How? Where? I don't actually want help myself, but I'd love to be able to redirect friends and family to some helpful Microsoft person.
Re: @deshepherd Gender sensitive framework
I suppose you can see why the effect of a 20mph limit on prostitutes might be important, too.
CV generator
So agents and employers rely on keyword search. Who can blame them, given that a day spent reading CVs is probably a day we'd all prefer to miss?
I see a requirement emerging here. I'm seriously thinking of writing a CV generator. I'll paste in the keywords from the job listing, and it will construct a CV from paragraphs that emphasise my experience with these skills, drawn from a database of everything I've ever done. I already do this manually in covering letters, which I suspect nobody ever reads.
Cobol
From the very beginning of my coding career I kept meaning to learn COBOL, but I always found myself falling asleep somewhere between the words "IDENTIFICATION DIVISION." and "ENVIRONMENT DIVISION.".
Dibol anyone? Powerhouse?
Interesting and useful article. Maybe it's time to reinstate some fossil skills on my CV. Then again, if I do that I might have to use them, and in most cases I was glad to leave them behind.
The worst part of programming is trying to understand old code written by a somebody for whom a good program is one that makes it to the end statement (which is usually in the same module as the start, 25,000 lines later). Any fossil job is going to involve a lot of that, and until the wolf comes scratching at my door I'd rather not.
Re: ICT is not attractive to women
@Faye B:
Only when young girls believe that IT will be welcoming, exciting and socially enhancing will it become as attractive as other professions and encourage them to pursue a career in that direction.
It's a job, not a f***ing coffee morning! You're there to get stuff done, not swan around interacting and socialising and enhancing.
greasy overall profession
In 30 years in IT, the only people I've seen in greasy overalls have generally been the cleaners.
I work in an office that is approximately 90% male and I can go an entire day without speaking to any of them.
Maybe if you had anything intelligent to say you'd get more interaction.
So why is it acceptable to make such a claim about men?
Because that's what women do, bless them.
Re: Automatic tills?
Nothing really wrong with self-service checkouts, except that they're as yet imperfect. Half of them claim to let you use your own bags but then make you hang around for verification if the bags aren't gossamer-light. And it's annoying to have to hang around for age verification because your shopping includes wine. The worst ones are in B&Q. They're voiced by a ratty woman who nags you if you pause for more than ten seconds between items.
But in what sense is this technology "imposed on us aggressively"? These checkouts are rarely more than 25% of the checkouts. I use them because they're fast, but if the former shadow minister for innovation doesn't like them she could always queue up at a manual checkout.
Re: Woman who gives up,
If she was a successful engineer, why on earth would she want to become a politician?
Re: We lack analogue greatness
@Eadon "an Office suit or browser without menu/toolbars"
Your suit has a browser, a menu and toolbars? Is it a pinstripe or tweed suit? What sort of GUI do your casual clothes have?
Re: NOW I feel old...
A previous post referred to "old DEC Alphas". I can remember working on Vaxes when the Alpha was a new thing. Actually, I think I can remember working on PDP/11s when the Vax was new.
The listeners are the problem
An audio system is the result of engineer's best effort to reproduce sound with minimal distortion. With the bass and treble controls centred you should hear something as close to the original as he could get it for the price.
So what do most listeners do? They turn the bass control to number 11. When that makes everything sound boomy, they turn the treble up to 11, too. The result is generally even more distortion as a result of overloading the power amplifier.
The difference between weather and climate
When the weather becomes warmer or windier or less predictable, it indicates that the climate is heating up.
By contrast, when the weather gets colder or calmer or more predictable, it's a purely local phenomenon of no significance.
Re: Essex
I though this test was on the Internet. Does Essex have its own Intranet?
Re: Maybe
@NomNomNom what would YOU say if Bill Gates walked up to the queen of England, slapped her round the face and said FUCK YOU
Don't be stupid. The problem in Korea was an accidental infringement of a local cultural convention. There are plenty of countries where greeting somebody with your hand in your pocket isn't a problem, but I don't suppose you can instance a single one where slapping somebody's face and saying "fuck you" isn't deliberately offensive.
Re: And in the Microsoft World
"Blackberry PI"
who?
JBoss currantly** encourages developers to use frameworks other than Java EE, such as Spring, and non-Java languages that run on the JVM, such as Clojure and Scala.
** I assume they must have a good raisin for this.
Fahrenheit?
"Google can't convert very lower Farenheit[sic] temperatures to Kelvin."
Are we to believe that boffins in the impressive-sounding Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search measure temperatures in Fahrenheit, so you have to use Google to convert them?
What else? Dimensions in yards? Volume in bushels? Weight in grains? Time in some insanely old-fashioned units like, er, seconds?
Flash-backed
When I saw the expression "flash-backed database", I couldn't help visualising a massive datacentre full of flash pen drives connected to USB sockets. What's more I imagined them all different, like the collection of pen drives in my desk drawer, from slick modern 5Gb units to crappy old 128Mb things. Maybe they even have a few of the novelty pen drives.
It's Friday afternoon and I need a beer.
Re: Renewable Energy
@h3 If we built astronomically large amounts of nuclear we could sell the energy really cheap
This is the second post here that makes the mistake of assuming nuclear energy is cheap because the direct unit cost is low. Nuclear power is capital-intensive. Most of the unit cost of output is a share of the cost of building and decommissioning the power station.
