* Posts by Dave Bell

2133 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Sep 2007

IT suppliers fear new GP consortia will 'create difficulties'

Dave Bell

Not so sure

GPs spend a lot of time training to be Doctors, and then have to run a business. But, one or two stories I've heard, they're maybe used to people not being entirely truthful.

The trouble is that the medical training won't help you pick out the untruths surrounding IT.

£1.1bn Royal Navy warship finally armed, sort of

Dave Bell

Old, but non-trivial

The real stupidity is in not having something such as Phalanx or one of the more modern equivalents. For much of what a warship would have to do, these days, the 4.5 and the 30mm guns are fine weapons, but if an incoming missile does get past Sea Viper, that seems to be the end of the game. Maybe the chaff rockets work.

There looks to be a lot of double-talk about the weapons fit. It's fitted for Harpoon launchers, but not with them. "Oh, sorry, can't fight now, I have to sail home and install weapons."

How to choose the right screen size

Dave Bell
Boffin

Making it easier

For small angles, measured in radians, the tangent of the angle is equal to the angle.

One minute of arc is 0.00029 radians

For those into target shooting, this is one inch at 100 yards.

It simplifies things a lot.

Radians are defined by a measurement along the arc of a circle. For these small angles the difference between a straight line and this arc is minute.

(I learned this at school, but I keep being told exam standards have slipped.)

O2's southeastern crash caused by 'well-organised theft'

Dave Bell
Coat

RFC1149

Well, somebody has to say it.

Up to $650 for a .xxx domain - or to keep your name off one

Dave Bell

How much?

Yes, the domain names do sound expensive, but a business that couldn't pay those prices might as well give up now.

There will be porn businesses which hold on to their pre-xxx domains, but any porn business that can't afford a .xxx is just waiting to go, er, tits up.

Steven Moffat fumes over Doctor Who plot leak

Dave Bell

Obviously,

You're forgetting something.

Dave Bell
Coat

Do you remember Z'ha'dum?

That was the climax episode for the third season of Babylon 5, and JMS went to some lengths to keep the episode title secret, not that it ever can be a secret right up to the time the episode is broadcast. There are TV listings published.

So, as the name appeared, all the fans knew that there was a prediction, to the effect that going to Z'ha'dum would lead to death.

JMS could have chosen a different title if he really didn't want to publish that stonking big clue.

The fans on the newsgroups decided that nobody could ever mention an episode name again, lest they spoil the show for other viewers. This wasn't quite crazy: those of us in the UK saw the episode a month before the Americans, but there was a huge dose of "we know better than the author".

I think the River Song character is playing with this real-world history, when she says "spoilers".

I reckon Steven Moffatt is right to take offence. He gave these people a preview, asked them not to talk, and one of the guys blabbed. And, while he's not perfect, I think he plays fair with the audience. There's so much happening that you can miss a clue, and he doesn't explain everything, but I think he has things worked out.

Anyway, you may have heard of the unreliable narrator as a device in fiction. The Pandorica two-parter makes everything that went before an unreliable narration. Everything, all the way back to Totter's Lane. RTD was closing off options like there was no tomorrow, and the way he kept pumping the climax-scale make "Doc" Smith look restrained. Steven Moffett has re-booted the universe, and gives a very personal threat to the Doctor.

DWP's poor IT systems threaten back-to-work scheme

Dave Bell

Has anything really changed?

We have a working world filled with short-term jobs, whether you're an IT contractor, a shop-assistant, or a bin-man.

These schemes will find a huge number of jobs, and put people in work, but since the jobs won't last there's not going to be a lot of money to pay the bills for providing the IT. And there'll be a lot more work for HMRC, keeping track of PAYE for these short term workers, and dealing with the refunds over the year.

And the politicians will be very enthusiastic about the number of available jobs. I wonder how you would measure it, I can see the room for arguments, but how long does the "average" job last today, compared to 20 or 30 years ago?

TalkTalk goes silent

Dave Bell

Good experiences

My experience of Tiscali, and now Talk Talk, has been generally good.

Now I'm wondering whether some of this particular FUBAR is essentially regional. How does a website failure affect voice telephone calls over the landline network?

(I have seen occasional DNS problems over the last couple of days.)

Virgin space rocketship trials 'feather' re-entry system

Dave Bell

Work it out...

This doesn't even need a pocket calculator to get a rough figure.

Just over 5000 feet to a mile, so about 4 miles in a minute, so 4 * 60 miles per hour.

That's 240mph, plus any forward component. It's fast compared to your drive to work, but a Spitfire could fly faster in level flight.

That's the sort of rough calculation you need when you use a slide rule. Somewhere around 200 knots true air speed. Indicated air speed is what matters, because that takes into account air density, but if you can call the environment "space" things have gotten fuzzy.

Oh, and a rough estimate would be an IAS of 120 knots. This is not a high-speed maneuver.

Slack bank practice creates opportunity for phone phishing scams

Dave Bell

This sounds barking mad

But oh so plausible.

I've had experience of organisations having silly implementations of data protection, typically involving a form arriving by which they got permission to tell anyone at all everything they had on record about you, with no clue what the original purpose was. Clearly they can't give every possible future necessity in their DPA registration.

The trouble is, not even being allowed to say who you are (in your example) makes you sound rather like one of those pestilential nuisance call centres. Yet who would expect the DPA to prevent a business clearly identifying themselves when calling a customer?

As far as I can tell, the DPA doesn't stop anyone from identifying themselves. It's the possible inferences made by whoever answers the 'phone, if they're not the customer.

I think I was about eight years old the first time I answered a business phone call. I'm told I was very clear, did a good job, but I suspect that if I'd had a call like that, you would never have spoken to my father at all.

Is there anything to find on bin Laden's hard drive?

Dave Bell
Coat

Text isn't random

There's several complications here, to do with the languages used, but the core point is that text, whether English or Arabic, isn't random. There are sequences of characters which happen a lot, and sequences which never happen. So, while it can be remembered more easily, a password or key is easier to attack than its length would suggest.

If he used a passage from the Koran, it would be relatively easy to brute-force. It's not that huge a key-space. Printed editions run between 200 and 400 pages, depending on edition, and it is roughly the same size as the Christian New Testament. An 8-character alphanumeric password list is a few billion pages long.

(Checks page-count estimate)

Lots bigger, if you want to get technical. OK?

Dave Bell

Plausible, but...

Do you want to depend on that bet winning?

Powerline networking pops up in Parliament

Dave Bell
Happy

Hey, there's a Referendum!

Just think, we have a ballot on Thursday that they have to listen to.

Me, I reckon, from the way the politicians are already squealing, that a "Yes" vote is going to be more fun.

Rackspace backtracks over toff-proof sign-up process

Dave Bell

Alternatives.

My teddy-bear apparently likes reading advertising emails. It's a good thing he has an email address that these sites will accept.

Amazon cloud fell from sky after botched network upgrade

Dave Bell

But what was affected, really?

I make use of a service which uses Amazon S3 to handle certain sorts of data request. It reduces the load on their own network.

There is a suggestion that their app code which takes advantage of this is flawed.

What I am sure of is that their performance sucked, last weekend, at the time when Amazon was sorting out this problem. Coincidence? This does look to have affected the network level of Amazon's operation.

It's not vital to me, but I can see a problem in these big "cloud" operations obscuring the risk.

iPhones secretly track 'scary amount' of your movements

Dave Bell

And also this report from Michigan

It seems that none of these phones are secure.

See this URL, and note that the situation dates back to 2008.

http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/34/3458.asp

The device that is being used is claimed, by the manufacturer, to be able to access all the data on your phone, bypassing the password protection.

ICT classes in school should be binned – IT biz body

Dave Bell

Seeing the results...

I took a very basic IT course, a few years ago, so as to have a piece of paper to wave in front of HR departments.

About half those taking the course were fresh out of schooi, and still struggling with the basics.

One problem seems to be that the curriculum development process can be so much slower to respond to changes than the real world of computer use. It wasn't quite so ridiculous to talk about Netscape in 2004, but there were a couple of obsolete search engines listed in the notes.

The computer graphics test--lay out a CD cover--was simple enough (and I was getting bored) that I did it without touching the mouse.

I obviously don't know about the current standards, but it struck me then that something such as the EDCL was a useful target for every school leaver, and a minimum standard of knowledge for every teacher, while a GCSE should be reserved for something a bit more advanced.

Somebody earning an ICT GCSE should have some idea about programming. That's a step up from the computer literacy everyone should have if they can get a good GCSE pass.

Short domain land-rush coming to .uk

Dave Bell

Was that a joke?

I understand that "fcuk" is a well-known clothing brand in the UK

But fc.uk couldn't be a valid domain name.

And if you want me to wear a t-shirt advertising the brand, you shall have to pay me. My hourly rate is quite modest.

XXX domain names go live

Dave Bell

Yawning

I can see why various people have argued against this, as allowing the intolerant to easily take action, but some of the arguments are just plain silly.

1: There seems to be no reason why a company cannot maintain .xxx and .com sites. Playboy is an obvious brand for doing this, One site for articles that some buy the magazine to read, the other for the pictures.

2: If a company in the porn business can't find $5 per month for a .xxx they're doing something wrong. They likely spend more than that on mayonnaise.

Blighty's Skylon spaceplane faces key tech test in June

Dave Bell

Turn-around costs...

The way things work out, fuel costs are pretty minor, compared to the cost of building the vehicle.

Elon Musk is trying to reduce construction costs, essentially building hardware for mass production.

Skylon is aiming to reduce the per-flight hardware cost, by making the whole thing reusable.

Where Skylon might have an advantage is in how it might be able to land without reaching orbit. It's partly historical accident, launching from Florida, but the Shuttle had an awkward gap between being unable to return to KSC and being able to abort to a runway in (I think) Spain. Skylon isn't dropping bits off: it could launch from somewhere near Denver (that altitude is useful too) with abort runways across the USA.

There's a lot of details that could make a difference.

Microsoft breaks own world record for IE nonsense

Dave Bell

Possible explanation

It's possible that Microsoft have a set of hidden API functions in the OS which gives IE an advantage over the competition.And maybe some over the code is written to fit with HTML5.

It's the sort of stuff they've done before.

Opera embraces Google's open source JPEG killer

Dave Bell

OpenJPEG?

OpenJPEG supports JPEG2000. I suppose there could be a licensing problem, but the BSD Licence doesn't have the problems GPL might,

US lawyer's email not creative enough for copyright protection

Dave Bell

US Copyright Registration

It also allows for additional damages, I suppose on the principle that you can't argue that you didn't know it had been copyrighted.

There's a couple of quirks of US Copyright Law-- "fair use" is an important one--but every country has a few quirks. The Berne Convention is a minimum.

On this particular legal point, if the lawyer had written his comment as a limerick, he would have been OK.

Robo-warship sub hunter: Free DARPA crowdsauce game

Dave Bell

To download...

Go to the webpage https://actuv.darpa.mil/ and click on the download link there.

I'm not sure why the link given by The Register is playing up: maybe DARPA don't want people to download without reading the warning from the lawyers.

Australians can’t read or count

Dave Bell

And another thing...

Look at another of today's stories: 30th Anniversary of the Osborne portable computer.

It's a bit of a rough calculation, but 2/5 of the working population will never have had the chance to learn anything about computers at school. (And that's the sort of rough mental calculation you would do if you were using a slide rule, so as to put the decimal point in the right place.)

It's likely that over half the working population lack a computer literacy qualification.

DARPA: Send limbless troops back to war with robo-arms

Dave Bell

Old Soldiers Never Die...

It's complicated. Some of those disabled veterans would jump at the chance, if you could assure that they wouldn't be endangering other soldiers.

Part of why soldiers fight is that they don't want to let down their mates. Part of effective treatment of PTSD can be finding the something useful, so that the victim doesn't feel useless. This isn't going to be something everyone will want to do, and they might not be going back into the infantry, but it does make some sense.

Asus Eee Pad Transformer

Dave Bell

Comparing prices

One thing to be wary of, with US pricing, is that the adverts don't quote figures with sales taxes. It's just not practical, with the variations across the country: state, county, school district, the variation is mind-boggled.

And then, with mail order, most people can dodge paying their local taxes.

Here in the UK, with 20% VAT, some things are advertised with VAT to add, but the computer business has shifted. They're bought by enough ordinary consumers, now, that the advertising isn't allowed not to include VAT.

That's £45 added to the price you give quoted.

It's still a rather too-big difference.

Me, I'm going to wait to see what price the retailers set. Who really believes what a manufacturer says about prices?

Dave Bell

So tempting

The tablet alone looks to be useful, with enough battery life. I think ebook readers could end up as a niche market, though it's a pretty big niche. This isn't something to just slip into a pocket, and you have to pay more attention to battery charge.

A lot of us don't need a full-feature word-processor, and if the keyboard stands up to long-term use, I can see this as replacing my old eee PC.

Yes, if you're in the corporate world, data security might be an issue. But I'm not. I want to be able to easily transfer data, and back it up.

Adaptors for MicroSD cards, to either standard SD slots or USB, are cheap.

US Army inks $66m deal for Judge Dredd smart-rifles

Dave Bell

Yes, but...

The thing has a thermal-imager sight.

They can be using it all day, without ever firing a shot.

There was a change in how soldiers used their weapons when the British Army put low-power telescopic sights on everything. This is more of the same.

Ofcom forced to publish tests on dodgy radio kit

Dave Bell

Canaries

You seem to have not noticed the reports, scattered through the thread, of these powerline networks interfering with other licenced uses such as TV broadcasts.

Radio Amateurs have to pass tests of technical knowledge, and take care to maintain their transmitters so as not to interfere with other users. So they have test equipment which can detect and measure the effects. They are also scattered across the country.

Radio Amateurs are, in matters such as this, somewhat like the miner's canary, which were more susceptible to noxious gases. When the canaries fall over, you know something is wrong.

Ofcom are idiots. This seems to go far beyond the usual discretion found in all law enforcement.

Google's 'clean' Linux headers: Are they really that dirty?

Dave Bell

The hard truth

Yes, this is true.

It seems to me to sit uneasily with the principle that an ordinary person should be able to know when they are breaking the law.

And, looking back over the years, I've seen some ingenious arguments advanced by lawyers, and some apparently stupid contact boiler-plate applied. The lawyers have one set of jargon, and the programmers another, and in cases such as this they struggle to reach a mutual understanding.

But if yoiu really want to hear the screaming start, refer to the technical language of the English teacher and grammarian as "jargon".

The Professionals set to abseil into cinema

Dave Bell

Remakes

I always thought that the movie of "The Avengers" had its moments, but you wouldn't have called it a classic episode. And it does seem that the way this sort of thing is handled has changed for the worst. I saw "Quantum of Solace" on TV over the weekend, and there was something almost disjointed about the structure. Danial Craig, Judi Dench, you have some serious acting talent, and it's a shame they didn't have a story to work with, just cut-scenes between action sequences.

James Bond is a little bit different, but these things have to somehow show the character dynamics of a long-running TV show. You're all too likely to get the awkwardness of a first episode. And it's hard to just play it as something the audience is familiar with because, mostly, they aren't.

I think I shall go and write my own action-adventure buddy movie. And I expect the special effects will be better too, running in the organic-CGI of my imagination. Though, for some reason, I can't quite get Jeremy Clarkson out of my head.

Fuel foolery, merger warnings and Budgetary boons

Dave Bell

Tricky Comparisons.

There are enough differences between the different types of tax that it's tricky to lump them all together, but the results aren't useless.

NI: part of the payment arising from an employer isn't part of wages, but it's part of the total cost of employing somebody, and it's a proportion of wages. NI does have a sort of "allowance" at the bottom end but it has a definite top limit and a fixed rate. So the high-paid pay less as a proportion of income (but probably pay for private medical care and pensions).

Income Tax: Based on income, with tax allowances, So the low-paid pay less as a proportion of the total, even before variations in tax rate come into play. No upper limit.

Combining the two is not going to be simple.

The Bayeux Tapestry archiving model

Dave Bell
Headmaster

With 'is 'awk in 'is 'and?

Yes, there's an argument for a different part of the picture to be the death of Harold. The Tapestry has a pattern linking pictures and text, and if Harold got it in the eye, that pattern is broken. it is, as I recall, to do with where the verbs are,

The Tapestry isn't the only source, and the eye version doesn't get mentioned elsewhere.

Libya fighting shows just how idiotic the Defence Review was

Dave Bell

Where's the substance?

I don't expect Lewis to be right about everything. But even if when he's wrong, they're smart questions.

I think he under-rates light armour. He's Navy, so maybe he doesn't get the advantages of being able to use ground vehicles that are armoured enough to protect against machineguns. Artillery firebases scattered across a country don't look so good idea, but the Royal Artillery are the military equivalent of a certain parcels delivery company: if you really want the high-explosive nastiness now, they can deliver, before the RAF can even scramble a jet. The logistic weight comes from providing that ability.

I don't think I'd go to British industry for a new battle tank. The numbers we would need, it would be crazy to design our own. If Challenger II were to need a replacement, I'd be inclined to look to Germany, but feel free to put that opinion down to one too many TV documentaries.

Channel VAT loophole shrunk, not shut

Dave Bell

Loophole?

It's my understanding that this is all controlled by an EU rule, which gives each member country some flexibility on the exemption limit. So this is about all that can be done. All this talk about flowers is a red herring.

And it's got to be applied to everyone.

I wonder how the UK's setting of the limit compares to other EU countries.

Fukushima: Situation improving all the time

Dave Bell
Boffin

Biasing the figures.

One thing which is fairly obvious from the Chernobyl figures, when you look at where the radiation was detected: nuclear power plants are the places set up to detect nuclear radiation. The places with obvious levels of radioactivity happened to be near nuclear power plants. A few years later, after somebody analysed weather radar records, and went to check, they found a hot spot in Yorkshire.

But the other side of this is that radiation is easy to detect. Geiger counters, and other instruments, with give you a very good analysis. Chemical pollution, from any cause, is much harder to track. The analysis is harder, and picking out the signature of particular event is more uncertain. Radiation decays in quite a predictable way. It doesn't depend on temperature, soil chemistry, or the presence of a particular sort of bacteria.

Microsoft Kinect powers DIY Eye of Sauron

Dave Bell
Coat

...Moley!

A friend tells me that it's her sword and cloak which scares the bible thumpers: that and pitching her voice lower than they expect. "Come in, I've been waiting for you."

Pr0n domain approved by ICANN

Dave Bell
Alert

All so predictable

Some porn sites will certainly use this domain, maybe most. Is a domain name going to be so terribly expensive? It's an advertising sign for them.

Some governments will block the domains totally.

Wait for governments to start using the ,xxx domains as targets for searches for "suspect" IP addresses. Suddenly, the porn business is going to be looking for more IP addresses, and their customers may need to access more addresses.

Is this how IPv6 is going to really take off, another new published technology riding to success on the beast with two backs?

Fukushima is a triumph for nuke power: Build more reactors now!

Dave Bell

Not Installed Here

There's are a few things about the reactor design which, when I heard of them, made me wonder if they would be built today. One or two things which might be OK in Kansas, so to speak.

But these aren't a reactor design used in the UK.

Three things seem clear:

1: There's a lot of people who know sweet F.A. about radiation.

2: There's a lot of reporters who can't even use Google.

3: There first guy I saw mention of, who put the radiation levels in any context, is the Captain of the US Navy aircraft carrier in the region. He wouldn't have that command if he didn't know something about the subject.

Perhaps the solution to any problems in the British nuclear power industry would be to put the Royal Navy in charge. (That isn't entirely a joke...)

Canonical pares Ubuntu down to 2 editions

Dave Bell
Linux

Running behind the curve, and install size.

I shall have to shift versions soon.

The 700MB CD-ROM is a constraint, and I can see the point in having a "lite" ISO-inage which could then expand itself to a full-install, either over the net or from other media. But I'd likely use a USB stick.

These can all have the same name, and the same end result. They're just install methods. Nobody complained much about having something split across two floppy disks. Am I old-fashioned not to object to a mid-install disk-swap?

Gmail auto sorts bulk mail, notifications, forum messages

Dave Bell
Coat

Check the Spam Detection

As the article said, it's duplicating what you can do with filters, but it looks as though it's using some of the detection techniques they already apply to Spam. And some of this doesn't need anything more than looking at the headers.

The keyword matching for one mailing list I'm on is interesting--fiction in 1930s pulp style, about seaplanes. We were discussing whether the natives would regard aviation safety as a religious duty, and I saw adverts for spanners, parachutes, and a company selling clerical clothing.

Somebody drew a picture.

Dixons Advent Vega

Dave Bell

Tradeoffs

USB and a Micro-SD slot: that's good to have. 4GB Micro-SD cards seem to be the default: you can buy 'em in Tesco. Smarter people get 16GB cards off the web.

If only there were the software easily available to exploit these features. It almost seems to be going in the opposite direction to the iPad.

O2 tries to explain its new prudish nature

Dave Bell

Taking the mickey...

I want to be a fly on the wall when the young man in the shop gets a granny asking him to process the proof-of-age. Funny looks? "Young man, haven't you ever heard of the Swinging Sixties?"

Dave Bell

The porn assumption

Maybe it's a good thing that Google Translate is blocked.

I don't object to proving my age.

I loath the belief that doing so is proof that I want to access porn.

I have a reason to go through the process to get around the block, which has nothing to do with porn as such. And selling the list as a list of porn users is arguably defamatory, and maybe a breach of the DPA. (Personal data must be accurate.)

Cobalt-barrel machine guns could fire full auto Hollywood style

Dave Bell
Grenade

Old problem, with an old solution

This is why most machine guns fire with an open bolt. That is, a round is not fed into the breech until the trigger is pulled, which releases the bolt, allowing it to close. This can be a little less accurate, because of the delay before the cartridge is fired, and the movement of the bolt mass.

Ofcom demands ISPs close 'upto' gap

Dave Bell

Car fuel consumption

The difference is that there is a standard way of measure the fuel consumption which you advertise. The manufacturers try to minimise the consumption, within the rules, but they're all doing it, and so the precise results can still be a useful comparison.

I wonder if we'll ever see a "Top Gear" for Broadband internet.

Traffic-light plague sweeps UK: Safety culture strangles Blighty

Dave Bell

Confusion

It makes sense for an American. Most of the world drives on the other side of the road to us. Maybe the DoT hasn't realised.

German data regulators move to tighten IP address laws

Dave Bell
Big Brother

IP Addresses and privacy

An IP address is a lot like a telephone number: part of the necessary working of the service, not always linkable to an individual, and yet the key to gathering a lot of information about an individual. We have laws and regulations covering the use of telephone numbers, and doing the same for IP address is justifiable. Of course, the technical differences do matter, and it's not going to stop the equivalent of the call centre in India.

What worries me is how IPv6 will change things. Dynamic IP was the easy answer for banks of dial-up modems, NAT staved off the effects of the limited number of IPv4 addresses. Both make IP address less definitely individual. IPv6 is going to shift that balance, and we need laws that will take account of the changes. I rather think an IPv6 address will be unique to a particular computer, rather than merely to an incoming 'phone line, or to the router that handles a connection for a whole business.