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* Posts by Andrew Yeomans

26 posts • joined Wednesday 6th June 2007 08:18 GMT

Andrew Yeomans

Retirement plan

Hey, have you seen the prices of PC133 RAM - that's not made any more? Worth a BOFH's ransom to those companies still running critical business processes on a massive 128MB RAM server.

Andrew Yeomans
Linux

Windows recovery

Reminds me of the Tomsrtbt floppy I used to have lying around. Labelled "Windows Recovery Disk" of course.

Andrew Yeomans

Expensive pints?

You can also get the previous 6 years for £3.58.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Bastard-Operator-Omnibus-2004-2010-ebook/dp/B005BCP7WI/

Andrew Yeomans

But it's still so passive!

Current cabling still costs a small fortune in copper, much of which is unused. Standard 10/100 Ethernet only uses half the conductors in the cable. Desks are over-provisioned with cable just in case future needs increase.

But the cost of making a passive termination socket is not actually much different from adding a few chips and making an active socket instead. That active electronics might be used to report on cable condition and faults (heck, even BT has slightly active master phone sockets with a resistor and capacitor so you can remotely check there's a continuous path to the socket). Or could be used as a mini-router, allowing a few workstations to be connected down a single shared cable.

Jack PCs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_PC) have been able to add significant intelligence to the socket, so certainly the concept is valid.

So why doesn't someone run with this opportunity?

Andrew Yeomans

Not gone...

"The midata vision of consumer empowerment" http://www.bis.gov.uk/news/topstories/2011/Nov/midata

"Midata - access and control your personal data" http://www.bis.gov.uk/policies/consumer-issues/personal-data

Strategy document: http://www.bis.gov.uk/policies/consumer-issues/consumer-empowerment

Andrew Yeomans

Non computo, ergo non sum

I do not compute, therefore I am not.

Andrew Yeomans
Flame

JCL - still understood next century?

//VERITY DD DSN=STOB,DISP=SHR,DISP=(NEW,CATLG,DELETE)

Andrew Yeomans

Also try looking on this one

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13200114

Andrew Yeomans
Thumb Up

Ccleaner is your friend

Ccleaner from http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner makes the housekeeping cleanup much easier and safer. Free download, then run it under each user account.

Andrew Yeomans
Go

They are advising Century Gothic 11pt

See http://www.uwgb.edu/compserv/ehelp/office2007/fontchanges.htm for the suggestion to change the font size in Word and Excel. That's close to Arial 12 pt.

Taking an identical sample of text at *screen resolution*, the average colour of Arial 12 was 23.6/255 black, Century Gothic 11 was 22/255 black. So CG11 was 93.2% as dark as Arial12. Readability seemed comparable. If anyone wants to repeat as higher magnification they might get a closer approximation to the print ink savings.

Andrew Yeomans
FAIL

Madness or bad statistics?

So the plan is to charge the British consumer £5 billion over ten years in order to pay the entertainment industry £1.7 billion?

Either madness or bad statistics. Or maybe both.

(Note the comparison of a yearly figure of costs against a ten-year figure of industry "rewards" to hide the huge discrepancy. And the claimed £500 million sounds about right - the Office for National Statistics lists 18.3 million households, times £25 per year = £475 million. Allow for new subscribers and you get the £500 *per year*.)

Andrew Yeomans

The follow-up device

Must be a gears-enabled caching proxy, so you *can* work on a plane.

Andrew Yeomans
Gates Halo

Windows the success it is among regular PC users?

Google currently has 21,200 references to the search "windows 7" "installation problems", but only 802 references to "ubuntu 9.10" "installation problems". [And altering the quotes or giving alternative strings also has Win7 outnumbering Ubuntu every time.]

Does this prove Windows 7 is harder to install than Ubuntu 9.10? Probably not, you really need to know the number of people trying to install either system.

But it does strongly suggest that the article is poorly researched and biased.

Andrew Yeomans

Don't forget Moore's law

Cloud providers also need to watch Moore's law. You've just invested megabucks in your new cloud-centre, but 18 months later someone can do it for half the price. "First mover" might easily become "first loser".

Andrew Yeomans
Gates Halo

Who is going to grab documents.com?

.. from Palo Alto research centre, who are not using it right now.

Which would be a much more meaningful name. Or don't people believe in "name follows function" any more?

Andrew Yeomans
Megaphone

"the data on the chip cannot be changed or modified"

Quite so. But that's not what Adam did, he made a *copy* and changed the data in the *copy*.

As John Lettice points out at the end of http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/09/id_cards_nir_tory_lib_plans/, the chip is intended to help detect tampering with the information printed on the card.

If you can make good forgeries of the card, then Adam's cloning lets you make the chip data match. But the reported Home Office statement is still factually correct, just not what it appears at first reading.

Andrew Yeomans
Pirate

Stealing content

Anton Chuvakin makes a good point in http://chuvakin.blogspot.com/2009/07/more-on-kindlegate.html :-

"As a result, I suspect that the more stuff like "KindleGate" happens, the more the following perception (whether true or not!) will grow, strengthen and develop:

When you "BUY" digital content, you don't really BUY it - it is not really a PURCHASE.

THEREFORE

When you STEAL digital content, you don't really STEAL it - it is not really a CRIME.

Andrew Yeomans
Badgers

Phantom calls

Back in 1992, trials of the "112" number led to many false alarms, see http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg13518280.400-cut-lines-led-to-phantom-calls.html.

"111" would be even more susceptible to line faults pulse-dialling the number.

(Badgers, as their setts could break the cables.)

Andrew Yeomans
Linux

Surely ChromeOS is a competitor to Splashtop?

From current information, doesn't ChromeOS look more like a competitor to instant-on Splashtop http://www.splashtop.com/ rather than Windows or Ubuntu NBR?

Andrew Yeomans

Modified versions of copyfraud

There's a variant when an older work is "updated" - maybe to "correct" old spellings or political incorrectness, and then re-published as a "new" work. Certainly happens with old hymns - just compare the words you used to remember with the latest text.

Now would that apply if the republished work had deliberate misprints to try to create a new copyright version?

Andrew Yeomans
Linux

Include *all* the copyrighted content, if there's a tax

If there really is a tax or other protection on copyrighted work, it would seem reasonable to apply this to all copyrighted works. Working out how to divvy up the spoils could be "interesting". Surely that 700 MB download of Ubuntu must be worth at least 175 times that 4 MB MP3?

Andrew Yeomans
Jobs Horns

What's it like for RSI?

Has anyone tested extended use of a flatter keyboard for Repetitive Strain Injury? Still, I suppose the future court claim is one way to get your money back!

Andrew Yeomans
Black Helicopters

ODF three times more popular than OOXML

Try googling for "filetype:docx" (15,400 pages) and "filetype:odt" (45,000 pages).

Similarly "filetype:xlsx" gives 3340 pages and "filetype:ods" gives 9670 pages.

So ODF has about three times as many documents and spreadsheets as OOXML at present. Both are dwarfed by .doc (21,900,000 pages) and .xls (4,420,000 pages). As for the macro-enabled OOXML .docm and .xlsm there are less than 600 together.

Andrew Yeomans
Unhappy

*Doesn't* protect the customer

Network Solutions *doesn't* protect the customer that was interested in the name. Anyone else can buy the domain name, but only from Network Solutions. So the only beneficiary is themselves.

They also put an "under construction" site on the domain. Great if you want to start a rumour - see http://microsoft-ubuntu.com for example. (And if you want to buy that, be Network Solution's guest.)

Andrew Yeomans

Fathi's vulnerability slide at RSA

...came from the Jeff Jones report comparing the number of vulnerabilities found during the first 6 months of each product's life. See page 10 of http://www.csoonline.com/pdf/6_Month_Vista_Vuln_Report.pdf as mentioned on http://blogs.technet.com/security/archive/2007/06/30/windows-vista-6-month-vulnerability-study.aspx

Jeff doesn't actually say that Vista is more secure, but does say "Windows Vista has an improved security vulnerability profile over its predecessor and a significantly better profile relative to comparable modern competitive operating systems."

Any flames have probably been said already in the Slashdot articles linked by Jeff.

Andrew Yeomans

Paris Pages jaune has had this for ages

See http://www.pagesjaunes.fr for photo guide. Example near Notre Dame: http://www.pagesjaunes.fr/ciweb2g-pagesjaunes/RecherchePhoto.do?crypt=Q/l4NQ9CzB3/YJABTAU7sGlQRfWfHAmbcGiGNyQUVYdGML6XRhgMa1d/7U4icTk73VdC4wrXLTOiUcsvL0Oe26josJG/1N6Rge6UTaKU2J93S1EaIWM0fVEEr1i4RPFSQ+qPFoVM1xIZbn+/EJ1kDWXP1q/oh7CS

London had quite good coverage a few years back, but I think the company went out of business.