Posts by Pete 486 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Mar 2007
Surely it's not the americans who have a monopoly on declaring war against abstract notions (terror?) and inanimate objects (drugs?). Why can't we play, too. I'd suggest replacing waponry with paint-balls (biodegradable, of course) and changing the specifications for all new battleships to be made of wood - from managed forests, only.
If this has the side-effect of making warfare less deadly and less effective, then that might just be a desirably benefit, as well.
Hah!
> Virgin Media engineers judged that any speed tester that varied by more than 10 per cent from the headline speed was unacceptably inaccurate.
if I ever got within 10% of my ISP's headline speed (16MBit/s) I'd be laughing. Even on the ADSL connection between my house the exchange I *never* get near this figure and the perl script that monitors my router tells me that over 30% of the time I'm getting 3 (yes, three) MBit/s.
Of course none of this matters as the ISP uses the modern-day weasel words "up to" when selling their package, so they can get away with any line speed they like. I would suspect that the real reason Virgin disliked the speed reports is not that they were inaccurate - but that they were reporting the truth.
So to "save" 31 jobs from going to other countries, 90-odd people are refusing to work. What possible outcomes can we see:
1.) T' management will cave and say "yes, you were right. Making our lives difficult, undermining the UK operations record on reliability has made us willing to keep these people on".
2.) The overseas operations will whisper in the boss' ears and say "they're all troublemakers, close the whole lot. We can pick up the extra work"
3.) The company will see the effect of not having the 90 strikers working and decide they don't need any of them
4.) A miracle will happen, the 31 jobs won't be "offshored" and the company will decide to move more work to the UK
Now, outsourcing is generally an admission that someone else can run your (IT) operation batter then you can. It's also a rather naive view that you'll still get all the tacit work done, that really helped the business run properly. However, I can't help thinking that we went through all this sort of unrest and poor judgement a generation ago - maybe there are some things that need relearning?
It's an expensive unit, with the inconvenience of having to drag an external power supply around to make any quantity of prints. The pricey prints themselves are postage-stamp sized and not very good quality. You can't even connect this thing to your PC - and yet it still scores 65%
Just out of interest, what score would it have got if they'd just sent you the empty box - 60%?
... and how many of them painted nudes (it's ok, it's art) or pictures of children - or both together?
This knee jerk, with the emphasis on the "jerk", reaction is a sad, if accurate, commentary of our time. I can't help thinking this is what all the superstitious stuff, baying crowds, ignorance and fear about witches and magic must've been like in the middle-ages. I wonder when we, as a culture, will grow out of it?
They're really just making up an excuse for having crap security. It's common practice to talk up the competency and technology used in a successful attack - and not just in the IT world, either. It makes the "victim" (read: clueless person/organisation) appear less at fault, if they can persuade the media that they were subject to technologies that the CIA or NSA would be bamboozled by.
The follow-up statement, then goes something like "we've never seen any attack like this". Which can be interpreted as meaning that the 16 year-old work experience kiddy, who's left in charge of the servers (on the basis that he/she has heard of AVG - which in our eyes makes them an expert) didn't know what was going on. Of course, when it's said by a grey-haired CIO in a £1000 suit, it sounds much more credible.
As it turns out, the election's over. No-one cares any more.
One compatibility, no confusion.
Now on the flip side, we have fewer compatible products, higher validation costs, reduced choice, increased prices. All you need to do is stick an apple logo on the box and what have you got?
An alternative plan would be to open up the API, simplify the architecture, provide a freely available validation suite and NOT CHANGE THINGS. What have you got now: well if not linux, something that is at least going in the right direction.
The biggest problem that peripheral designers face is when the O/S changes. Not only do you have to go right back and rewrite, retest and revalidate your drivers, but you have to maintain compatibility with all the older versions that make up your bread-and-butter sales. Since people buy computers to get things done (apart from the small number of fan-boys with too much money, who merely want bragging rights for the latest and greatest - even though they'll never use 90% of it's features), they really don't care what the operating system is, provided it doesn't get in the way - or stand between them and the perfectly good peripherals they've already bought
(though that's never stopped me before), but does anyone in the Debian community represent the users? Has anyone been given, or has assumed, the responsibility to ask questions like "why would anyone want this [feature]?", or even to act as a gatekeeper to prevent new stuff getting in if it's not properly debugged, documented or simply too slow, resource-hungry or bloated.
While it can be argued that why would the Debian want to lumber itself with such a thing, when they're all having such a nice time doing whatever the hell they please - and more importantly, none of the other O/S's appear to, either (including the obvious commercial alternatives). I can't help thinking that looking at their stuff from a user's perspective would be a giant leap forward in gaining acceptance by the "average user" and maybe even making linux's share of the desktop something to be proud of.
After all, how many movie viewing, or CD burning programs does the average linux distribution need?
... because it's free.
One of the tenets of free software is that you're only allowed to say good things about it. if you dissent, you can expect a stream of comments along the lines of
"Hey, it's free. If you don't like it, just uninstall it" or, my favourite (also used by **** Air to justify crappy service):
"What do you expect for nothing" with the implication that the supplier is actually doing you a favour by letting you have their software/service/product/flight.
In fact, as we all know deep down, there's no such thing as free. Zero financial cost, yes - but when the time spent trying to turn a pigs ear into a silk purse is factored in, a lot of "free" software is very expensive indeed. In this particular case it provides no additional benefits over what I already have (not free) so I can't see any reason why I should spend my time on it.
YMMV
There's a long tradition of talking up astronomical events: comets are particularly prone to hype. Meteor showers, too. However all these "spectacular" events, with their fireballs and what-not assume that the observer lives somewhere with pristine, dark skies - not a streetlight in sight. They also assume that the sky will be moonless (which, to be fair it is for this particular event) and that it will be cloudless. The promoters of this stuff also make the assumption that their readers give a damn.
Sadly, in the UK hardly any of these conditions are ever met. We have terrible light-pollution (inevitable when you get large groups of people living close together and demanding the "safety" that streetlights offer) and even worse cloud-cover. Couple this with the fireworks that are a certainty for the next week or so and you have impossible conditions for seeing anything in the sky. The only possible exceptions are late-night flights and police helicopters - though hopefully the latter have the sense to steer well clear while fireworks are available!
So far as giving a damn goes, maybe the first few times that a comet, or nova, or meteor shower gets mentioned, but after freezing your bits off, looking for apparitions that simply don't appear, most people give up and develop a skepticism for astronomical events that kills off any credibility the scientists and/or enthusiasts making these claims might have had.
What we need is a bit more honesty from these folks, enthusiasm is nice, but a realistic appraisal of what you might see is better.
While the magazine says that CIOs will cut their budgets next year, I think this is really just bravado. What happens in the real world is not that the CIOs cut the budgets themselves, but that the finance people do it for them.
Since CFOs unanimously think of IT as a cost centre, it's an easy target to axe all these wizzy new projects that they don't understand - and will probably not work, exceed their costs and run late anyway. Part of our problem has always been that the bean-counters simply don't understand the role of IT. It's frequently seen as a "necessary evil" and therefore marginalised. What we (all) need to do during the next upturn is to let the guardians of the monkey know how IT helps them.
Make the new motto "hug a bean counter" You never know, if you hug them hard enough, they might just stop breathing.
Just because the article contains such linguistic gymnastics as "This has got a very low likelihood that anybody will be impacted by it,", instead of the easier "we don't think it will hit anyone", is it really necessary for the headlines to compete for a prize for lack of meaning?
Although given the logic behind this gem: "If anybody found a piece of anything on the ground Monday morning, I would hope they wouldn't get too close to it." you've got to wonder who writes this stuff.
If you have a submarine at your disposal and want to seriously screw our internet capacity, just use your sub. to cut the undersea cables.. That way you'd drop not only the internet connections we have, but the majority of telephone capacity, too.
In fact, you wouldn't even need a submarine, just have an old trawler drag it's anchor alond selected parts of the seabed and you'd strike lucky.
What would be more illuminating would be to see how all the candidates compare to past presidents. Then we might be able to say which have been the most successful strategies in the past. All that would remain then would be to teach them to a parrot, and the rest of the world could breathe a sigh of relief: save in the knowledge that no more bad things would happen so long as the newly elected president didn't run out of bird-food.
Everyone who's worked in tech support has come across the smoking[1] wreck of a PC, where it's obvious that the user has spent hours (maybe days) trying to get it to do something and in the process has FUBAR'd it. When challenged, these users generally respond to the question "What did you do to it?" with the phrase all parents know: "Nothing, it just broke"
Now, I'm perfectly willing to accept that no system is perfect and that there are occasions where something as simple as a button press could be mis-translated into an entry for the other side (especially as no-one is allowed to inspect either the workings, or the software of these gizmos). However, as this video http://www.rocketboom.com/rb_08_oct_21/ shows, we're not talking about a brain-surgeon's convention here. Even the smallest application of Occam's razor would lead to the conclusion that voters are the main cause of errors in electronic voting, no matter how simple you try to make it, or how strenuously they deny screwing it up.
[1] figuratively speaking of course
Imagine an enemy (as they couldn't possibly be a friendly - could they?) with the power to irradiate your spacecraft. One that could shine intense beams of X-rays at your satellites and has known to disable at least one. In fact this enemy threat is so real, it's even responsible for global warming.
Obviously the americans can't allow such a challenge to their self-declared superiority to go unacknowledged. What they obviously need to do is deploy weapons in space to counter this previously unconsidered force, and if some of the prezzie's friends and business partners get to make a few Mil. out of the operation - well it's a just reward for their patriotism.
and from what I've read, there's nothing new and compelling that I'll be able to do with it that I can't already do with XP. Any O/S by itself is irrelevant - it's merely a platform for running applications. Sadly Vista makes that far too hard and that's it's problem.
a couple of people (and it could be anyone within the organisations) sent an email to, at a guess, postmaster@liberty-human-rights.org asking if they'd be interested in making a bit of money. Liberty doesn't have to have received the email - and if it was sent to a made-up address, it's likely they didn't - for the story to be factually correct.
However, if this is the case, the story boils down to:
- someone sent an email, Liberty didn't receive it, nothing happened
which obviously needs a bit of sexing up (as only newspapers know how) to make it into the Observer and for it to be followed up to get even more mileage out of a bundle 'o nothing. One presumes that all the other scoops, investigations, special reports and exclusives these journos churn out on a slow-news week are equally substantial and prepared with the same amount of care.
>> The climate is like a bath
No the guy's right. Substitute "bath_tub" for bath and it's a reasonable model.
However, the question that pertains is how long does it take for CO2 to be scrubbed from the atmosphere?
If it's 50 years - which is the shortest guess I've heard then our short-term eco-frenzy may, just avoid the absolute worst of things. However, if it's 300 years which is the longest time that I've seen in the literature then we're screwed. The reason is that we'll burn all the oil in less than that time, so the "old" CO2 won't have been removed before the "new" CO2 is emitted. In that case it doesn't matter whether we take 200 years to use up all the oil or 20 years - the same amount of CO2 will remain in the atmosphere and so the climate change it causes will be the same.
In fact, if the longer timescales do turn out to be the case, it may be beneficial to the planet (not that the planet cares - needless anthropomorphism only weakens the argument) to go for a "short, sharp, shock" so that the recovery process can start sooner. Hmmm,.
Ahh, that cheered me up.
> Does your political system not reflect the will of the people or is it just slow in reacting?
No, of course it doesn't. The british people get to vote once every 5 years or so. The two major parties in the UK have essentially the same goals and the same limitations, so what electors get to deide is which leader (for it is the leader they're really voting for in practice, not the particular individual who will represent their local constituency) they like most - or dislike least, based purely on perceived personality and who the tabloid press tell them is "best".
However, once in power the ruling party can effectively do whatever they please. They are neither bound to fulfill the promises they made in their election manifestos, nor are they limited to only govern within their stated boundaries. So, for example no electors were consulted about going to war (but that's never been the case), nor were they consulted about the billions they are being forced to spend on the 2012 olympics, nor on how much of their money should be spent on the recent bail-out of the financial system, nor if they want the huge numbers of CCTVs that surveille everybody, everywhere, nor on future energy policies, new roads, airport locations, housebuilding sites or anything else that has an effect on day-to-day life. In short voters in the UK are never allowed to express their will on any single items of policy - you take one bundle or another.
Do we get the government we deserve? probably. But that's british democracy for you - wonderful, isn't it?
OK, here's what I don't understand about the debate, as a whole.
We talk about reducing our (whoever "us" is, but that's not my real question) emissions in order to reduce the effect on the world climate. However, by doing so are we expecting that this will actually leave the oil we don't consume in the ground, and that no-one else will burn it?
I can't shake the suspicion that at some point in the future all the easily accessible oil and gas will be used up - if not by us (whoever "we" are), then by someone else. Now, I'm quite happy to do my bit and I would say I'm well ahead of the game in terms of keeping my consumption down. But if the result of doing so is simply that someone else picks up the slack, then the question about using up the fossil fuels comes down to who will do it and when.
If that is the case, then is there any real point in us (again, but this is getting boring) hobbling ourselves both economically and strategically for a conclusion that is already half-way to being played out.
Having read the report linked to, I can't help feeling that the London part of this "survey" was carried out by a couple of people with a lappy from the upper deck of a bus, on a short hop from Holborn to Canarf Wharf - and then back again.
> The survey was carried out by a team of independent security consultants using a laptop computer and commercial scanning software.
It certainly didn't cover much ground (literally) and the amount of "normal" residential property in among the swanky loft apartments doesn't sound much like the vast majority of suburbia.
The report itself is very professionally finished: lots of business graphics in nearly identical, themed colours (so as not to spoil the "design" of the product, by drawing attention to it's actual content). Lots of often repeated conclusions and a large amount of space dedicated to explaining what all this stuff is, in nice soothing tones so as not to surprise the CEOs, who they hope will read it. This is obviously where it wins. If the average techy had written this, I (sorry, they) would've got it down to a single page, with a table of results and a summary saying "mostly harmless". Maybe it's time to polish up the old marketing skills and worry less about the actual content?
Government is about people. Those who tell us what to do and those who decide who should tell. As such, it's right that voting is a tangible process so we can see, from start to finish, how our votes are handled and recorded. While I would like to see elections be more than simply deciding which insincere, self-interested crook gets to do the telling, it's apparent that the lack of transparency in the electronic process is more of a barrier to the democratic process than a help.
Maybe in the future, we'll be able to produce systems that will record our actual wishes on real, specific and individual policies, as well as (or better: instead of) merely indicating who we'd like to send to the trough. However, I can't see that the turkeys would ever vote for christmas, so there's little chance of those in power moving to change the system that got them there.
> Each unit is virtually its own business and it is not uncommon for them to have their own IT departments and networks .... To talk about a seamless, centrally driven National Programme is nonsense.
Au contraire, my friend. This is precisely why standardisation is a good thing. It's why every doctor, when presented with the same medical condition (and obviously, patient situation) should prescribe the same treatment. It's why every nurse should do the same things to the same patients, the same meals served and the same administrative practices carried out in every hospital, surgery and walk-in centre everywhere.The thing that makes the NHS so inefficient, (as shown up in the league tables that have been forced on them) and therefore indirectly kills countless people each year is the phrase "oh, here we do it differently ..."
It's because of all the different ways of doing things, the idiosyncracies of the staff, the personal feuds and biases, the "I know better" attitudes and the sheer arrogance of the senior staff that the whole setup is such a mess. What the NHS needs is for someone with the authority and personality to say "do it this way or get out." Only then will we be able to have an NHS that spends money and effort on the patients, not the staff and can respond in a consistent and timely fashion to changing needs and expectations.
When you start a small business, it's quite easy to gather a team that is highly motivated and focussed on the goals of delivering service. You can communicate effectively with your staff and ensure everyone's making their contribution.
However as organisations grow, the goals get diluted. The needs of the staff increase in importance and the needs of the customers become more distant, as fewer and fewer of your people find themselves at the revenue-earning sharp end of the biz. Ultimately you get to organisations like the NHS, taken as a whole, one of the largest employers in the world. Almost no strategic decisions in this set-up are made primarily for the benefit of the patients. They'll be made for reasons of cost, CYA, expediency but primarily for the convenience and benefit of the staff themselves. This is why it's next to impossible to book doctor's appointments. It's why waiting rooms ban the use of mobie phones (even though they're permitted on heart wards - first hand experience here, guys) and with relevance to this topic - it's why NHS people don't like to learn new technologies. Apart from the sheer bother of old dogs and new tricks, most tech today is used to reduce headcounts or to empower users. Areas that NHS staff, themselves, have a vested interest in eliminating.
> £320,000 it pays annually towards just three fixed cameras
putting aside the political shenanigans that all the commentators seem to be fixated on, doesn't this seem like a lot of monkey to spend on three roadside devices: whatever they might be?
Maybe the cops are really just annoyed that this cash it might actually go back to the people of Swindon, rather than being "rightfully" spent on the current weasel-words of fighting crime and terrorism.
... the volunteers gained and your total will be negative.
Really, the people who did this work are volunteers. They chose to spend their own time in this pursuit and therefore gained some (intangible) benefits from doing so. Whether that was entertainment, peer-group recognition, bragging rights, magnanimous giving, the chance for fame or self-education is irrelevant:, what they got out of the exercise was, as a whole, greater than what they put in.
So far as corporately sponsored or produced donations goes - who can say. In true capitalist traditions some choose to give away, or sell at a loss. Whether they get any long-tern gain from that is part of the gamble. Since wealth is increasing over the long-term, you've got to say that this strategy, too, pays off.
By trying to put a cash value on the development effort, the researcher betrays a mean spirited attitude: that everything can (should?) be thought of purely in monetary terms. By assuming the costs are all in US dollars and includes american rates of overhead (the 2.4 times salary component) he/she/it demonstrates a level of parochialism that invalidates not only their attitude, but their methodology, too. Ignore.
Given the utter lack of ability of pretty much all PC sales staff, it wouldn't surprise me if the real reason was that the sales people would focus on selling the easy stuff they understood: such as windows, rather than have to learn how to navigate the the menus, functions and methods that linux (or a Mac, for that matter) would require. Meaning that the sales would suffer, simply because the sales people would never demo the unit to prospective customers.
Of course the really hard part of selling a Linux lappy to "the man in the street" is coming up with a convincing response to the question "why can't I just have XP?"
If the plan is to know who (or at least, who owns the phone) made calls to known baddies, then there are some big red loopholes to be found in many public places - though not as many as there used to be (and even fewer that haven't been vandalised).
The next obvious step, to ensure that all these terrorists who are apparently everywhere in the UK and planning mis-deeds on a daily basis, is to post a plastic piggie outside each public phone box and to immediately arrest anyone who even looks at it under the terrorism laws. Even more - we'll also need PCSOs posted in the vicinity of every office phone, just in case this army of baddies actually have jobs and dare to use the office lines to plot their dastardly doings.
Only when all the technological achievements of the past 100-odd years have been rolled back, banned, suppressed or criminalised will we be truly safe.
Oh goody, big brother and corry and endless games-shows so you can see every detail of the participants' zits and wrinkles.
This looks like a prime example of slick packaging to disguise crap content. Let's have some decent quality programmes - ones that would actually benefit from HD, rather than warming up the same old sad old content these channels produce: day-in day-out.. Then it might be worth buying the gizmos needed to watch them - until then plain old SD is far more than good enough for their programming.
Typically, virus writers go after the low-hanging fruit. The stuff that's easiest to exploit - for a reasonable return.
Giving (well, OK: selling) people a device where most of the code is available, or to be made available AND can be used to suck money directly out of your bank account is a bit of a game changer. It now becomes much more profitable for the baddies to spend a lot of time and ingenuity to find ways to subvert, exploit or create loopholes in this open platform. Their motivation (and numbers) being far greater that that of the developers, it's only a matter of time before Andriod exploits start circulating.
Up to now, linux has had a reputation for being secure. A lot of this is based on the fact that M$'s products are far more popular - thus providing a bigger, if not juicier target and traditionally containing security holes large enough to drive a SCSI bus through. As a consequence, the number of Linux exploits - ones that have actually been used to do nasty things on other people's linux platforms, have been scarce. I can see that the assumptions the security assessments are based on will soon be challenged.
Personally, I'll give the Andriod a miss - it's only a phone afterall - and stick with the tried and trusted rule: never use version 1
Maybe we'd be more inclined to believe there was a credible threat - that actually needed to keep innocent people in the slammer for 6 weeks, if all governments in living memory hadn't used every opportunity to lie, spin, decieve, mislead, leak, deny, regenge, divert and corrupt every major event - from "peace in our time" through "weapons of mass destruction" right up to "no more boom and bust".
The tragedy is, that there may well be some reasons where prolonged incarceration of the general public, with neither charge nor the opportunity to defend themselves, is necessary for the greater good. Sadly hwoever, no right-minded voters would ever trust either party with such powers, given their parlous history of misuse and exploitation in the past.
that airport employees steal from passengers or that stolen gear gets sold on ebay?
footnote: if you really thought that neither of these happens everywhere on a daily basis, you've never:
a) flown anywhere and been subject to "security" taking off you anything they choose
b) used ebay
No doubt the next revelation will be about the journalist who embellished a story, or the cop who let someone off because his/her shift was due to end and they didn't fancy staying to do the paperwork.
That's the lovely thing about all these prognostications that Gartner continually comes up with: not a single one of them is independently verifiable. Even if some other organisation has the temerity to question these goat-entrail style guesses, they can simply say that they were measuring a different set of attributes - or used some other definitions.
Even if they do turn out to be correct - there is no way that knowing these generalities can be used in any actionable way, by any of the businesses affected.
However, not to be outdone, I am planning to unveil the Pete Index. This is a broad measure of the amount of uncertainty in the IT world. This uncertainty can arise from fear of recession - leading to uncertainty about shrinking markets, or from growth - leading to uncertainty about how to grow your business. The P.I. will also include uncertainty about uncertainty itself - we're not sure what it is that we don't know. I am pleased to announce that the P.I. has increased from it's baseline figure of 1000, to 1002.073 just while I've been writing this piece. This increase is due to the uncertainty in how this posting will end.
The time limit on detentions supposedly reflects that amount of time the fuzz need to investigate a situation. This is a function of the number of man-hours applied to the particular case, not the number of times the sun sets. If the police consider something to be important enough, they should assign more people to work on it. If there aren't enough people available - or enough money to pay their overtime, that's not the suspect's fault and they should not be held merely for that reason.
Instead of extending the length of time anyone can be held, a government that seriously thinks there's a need to expend more effort on some cases should be required to apply that effort in a shorter time, rather than to detain innocent people if it's not convenient to "process" them quicker. Let's see how seriously they take these so-called threats by having them assign more money to these investigations, not by imprisoning people on no charge until they get round to doing some detective work.
On the one hand we have the ideal: schools will educate children, providing them with the ability to live fulfilled and worthy lives. To be able to contribute to society and understand the world in which they live.
On the other hand we need someone to look after the little wretches while their parents are at work. Preferable as cheaply as possible and without inconveniencing their minders, sorry "teachers".
On the gripping hand (look it up) we have a large number of people who work in schools. They want an easy life. Preferably with as little contact as possible with the kids - certainly not to the point where their academic inadequacies (the teachers: not the kids') get exposed. To achieve this they should be allowed to focus on nice, easy, entertaining topics, rather than ones which are required in real-world situations.
Now consider this initiative: educate / mind / entertain ?
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