* Posts by John H Woods

3577 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Nov 2007

My TIGHT PANTS made my HUGE iPHONE go all BENDY!

John H Woods Silver badge

I'm going to be downvoted but ...

to me, the US definition of pants makes sense --- whilst the UK shortening of underpants to pants does not; any more than shortening underground to ground would.

Range Rover to fit trendy new SUV with FRIKKIN' LASER HUDs

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: Call me sceptical

Actually, I have seen "60" signs - they're no that uncommon. But I'm not sure sign recognition is much of a bonus. Gear selection indicators, however, can be useful - not so much for telling you what gear you are in, but for hinting a more economical choice. Not that it matters with this car, as (a) they won't care too much about economy or green driving and (b) I bet a huge majority of them will be auto transmission.

Dyslexic, dyspraxic? No probs, says GCHQ

John H Woods Silver badge

AC: "You're lucky."

Ah, I came across wrong then (possibly the reason I got thumbed-down). When I said the salaries were too low, I meant that - for the abilities they appear to require - they are underpaying. I'm probably not even good enough to work there (what I said about neuro-normal also means I'm no genius). But I am in no way disparaging the neuro-diverse, I'm just against them being exploited.

MOST iPhone strokers SPURN iOS 8: iOS 7 'un-updatening' in 5...4...

John H Woods Silver badge

Plug in?

Just because I indulge Mrs W. with fruity devices, and pretty much do everything I am told, there is no way she is installing iTunes on any of these boxes. So if she hasn't got the space, she ain't getting the update, lazy has zip to do with it.

Moon landing was real and WE CAN PROVE IT, says Nvidia

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: Return journey

"Build yourself a nice whirly ship for gravity". Whirlyness not needed, just a constant acceleration of around 1g -- maybe that magical microwave propulsion system. You could get almost anywhere in the Universe within about 60 years - 30 years at 1g to get to (near enough) the speed of light, travel as required with barely any time passing then decelerate for 30 years at 1g (with the crew compartment rotated 180, of course).

Bill Gates, drugs and the internet: Top 10 Larry Ellison quotes

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IMHO ...

... He was right about Cloud, Leo Appotheker, Open Source.

But does Bill Gates really think himself to be one of the cleverest men in the USA? I'm not sure that's entirely fair, and I'm not a massive fan (philanthropy aside). Then again, I've never met him ...

A spin of roulette in the sporty Ford Fiesta Black

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: Environment too, not just economy

Autostop just takes a bit of getting used to - if you don't want to disengage it, and you don't want it to stop on this instance, just keep the clutch down. Another advantage (on my little A3, anyway) is that if you stall (so I'm told :-) ) it restarts automagically.

Apple's warrant canary riddle: Cock-up, conspiracy, or anti-Google point-scoring

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What?

"To date, our Western governments have been doing a great job of keep civilians unfamiliar with that feeling."

And my tiger-repellent key-fob has also proven to be pretty effective.

John H Woods Silver badge
Holmes

Reading "too much" into it ... ?

John Tserkezis: "I think everyone's reading too much into this"

The definition of a warrant canary is a statement whose amendment or removal IS a message. So either you are saying that the initial statement was not a warrant canary, or that it was and it has been triggered accidentally (e.g. by someone amending the wording with a different purpose than sending the message).

I think both of these are unlikely. If the statement were not a warrant canary, why would it have been so specific in its wording? If it were a warrant canary, who would have been authorized to change the wording who wouldn't also have known they shouldn't remove the original highly specific wording?

"How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?" said someone or other...

iPhone 6: The final straw for Android makers eaten alive by the data parasite?

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Re: Oh for f*ck's sake...

@Sean Timarco Baggaley - nail on head. I'm not even nearly a fruitchomp fan, but this is absolutely where Apple come out on top. I'm convinced their hardware is excellent, I'm fairly convinced their software is over-rated, but where they always score is moving the *business* rather than the product.

4K-ing excellent TV is on its way ... in its own sweet time, natch

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: I already see too much on HD

Hasham: "Blackheads and the tiny hairs on ladies' chins and upper lips. What horrors await us with 4K I shudder to think."

Yeah, HD ruined the 9xx channels for me, too.

Italy's High Court orders HP to refund punter for putting Windows on PC

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: EULAs on other, non-OS software

IANALBIPOOTI and I think there is UK case law that covers this: I seem to remember some contract conditions (parking Ts&Cs) were not enforceable because they were only displayed on the back of the ticket, and the contract (purchase of said ticket) had to be entered into before the terms could be read.

CryptoLocker-style ransomware booms 700 PER CENT this year

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: We need a good backup solution

Agreed - I think the killer functionality in the consumer space would be proper versioning (the only way to defeat cryptolocker). I think Dropbox has such a system, but it would be great to see it on consumer back up boxes like (secondary) NAS and external HDD systems.

Cops apologise for leaving EXPLOSIVES in suitcase at airport

John H Woods Silver badge
Joke

Re: Doesn't ring true indeed

Good job there aren't any conspiracy theorists around! I bet those crazy idiots would think this was some kind of false-flag black-ops terrorism attempt to justify the increased terror alert, but was just inadvertently foiled by a women taking the wrong bag!

What the BLOCK? Microsoft to gobble Minecraft-maker 'for $2bn'

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: It was fun while it lasted.

>>(kewpie doll to anyone who knows where "death nail" came from)

Confusion between "death knell" and "nail in the coffin", I would guess.

TV techies proudly display their MIGHTY BENDERS in Berlin

John H Woods Silver badge

Front Projection

Some of these big screens weigh so much that the installation the require makes front projection look like not just the cheaper option, but the easiest one too.

Heavy VPN users are probably pirates, says BBC

John H Woods Silver badge

>>my usage for the last month is over 200GB

My sons have Steam; and bought a copy of Wolfenstein each --- 88GB in a couple of days. I watch a lot of SKY on-demand - that is 1-2GB per hour of TV. I work from home and that's probably another 1-2GB per day. Our monthly usage is therefore the thick end of a TB and (for all their peak time congestion) SKY have honoured their promise of 'unlimited'.

So, if I VPN all that, I'm a pirate unless I can prove I'm not? How, by accounting for every GB of data I have downloaded? The idea is simply ridiculous.

IT jargon is absolutely REAMED with sexual double-entendres

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: Alistair Dabbs

>> the Will Self of the IT world

>Except much shorter, poorer and less likely to get published in New Statesman or The Guardian. I >know this because I tried.

Their loss.

Scottish Independence?

John H Woods Silver badge

Scottish Independence?

Any IT workers out there rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of all the IT work that would seem to be entailed by a YES vote?

* unlike (apparently the vast majority of) politicians, journalists and pundits I realise that 51%:49% in a poll with a 95% confidence interval larger than 2% does not show a majority that one group is ahead.

3D scanning made easy: Reg man ponders terrifying Xmas pressie

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: There's going to be a lot of landfill

I doubt it ... most 3D printed objects have a relatively simple composition (and maybe a few pigments) - pretty much a recycler's dream. Even better, use an edible substance such as chocolate --- although maybe not for coffee mugs :-)

Jimbo tells Wikipedians: You CAN'T vote to disable 'key software features'

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Re: @lurker

"How much would Jimbo have contributed to the access of information without Tim Berners-Lee and Vint Cerf? No web, no wiki. No internet, no wiki."

Agreed, but let's not forget Ward Cunningham!

Data entry REAR-END SNAFU: Weighty ballsup leads to plane take-off flap

John H Woods Silver badge

Why the Warsaw flight crashed...

I heard the joke as follows:

The pilot was just a simple Pole in a complex plane - so they used the method of steepest descents.

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: the “adult weight” of 87kg

At 1.78m and 68kg I think you're slimmer than average if you're male. You're the same height as me though ... anecdote:

My Doctor: "You are 15 Stone. Do you know your BMI?"

Me: "Of course, it's exactly twice my weight in Stone, 30"

Dr: "That's not how you calculate it"

Me: "It is if you are 5 foot 10"

Dr: *fiddles with calculator, then laughs* "do you spend a lot of time sitting around thinking about maths?"

Me: "Why do you think I'm so fat?"

Scared of brute force password attacks? Just 'GIVE UP' says Microsoft

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: Some valid points ...

"Who uses just one device?" Well, a lot of people who don't read El Reg, and that (use random strings and rely on email reset if the browser forgets) is the advice I give them. What I use myself is this:

echo -n 'PASS SITE USER' | sha256sum - | base64 | tr 'a-m' '!--' | cut -c -16 | head -1

where PASS is my own secret password; SITE is the URL of the login page; and USER is the userid for that site. That gives me a unique password with 96 bits of entropy for every site (the tr allows me to pass arbitrary rules about including punctuation), and I can calculate it on any device with a terminal (including my Android phone). *Then* I user browser caching.

John H Woods Silver badge

Some valid points ...

... but I really cannot see the rationale for reuse. They seem to suggest that it reduces cognitive load, but you could just use different high-entropy strings for each website and just store the password in your browser. As long as you can remember your email password, you'll be able to reset any as required.

YES, I have ridden the Unicorn: The Ubuntu Utopic unicorn

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: why?

That's a bit like saying people shouldn't be able to choose their own interior decor because you don't like the inside of any of your friends' houses.

Virgin Media blocks 'wankers' from permissible passwords

John H Woods Silver badge

PSN Home was even worse when it started ...

Hello = ****o

Indian = *******

Yes, that's right, a whole continent of people were forbidden to state their nationality, because the word might offend some Native Americans. Although, weirdly, the only Native American I've ever met referred to herself as (Sioux) Indian.

It was still possible to call people vvankers though, it just needed two Vs.

Alienware injects EVEN MORE ALIEN into redesigned Area-51 gaming PC

John H Woods Silver badge

I think I'd rather have...

3 2k monitors and double the framerate? Anyone with a 4K monitor (I've never seen one in the flesh) care to disagree, I'm genuinely interested.

Ofcom will not probe lesbian lizard snog in new Dr Who series

John H Woods Silver badge

It would be plain rude to call him Mister Spock unless ...

... he was a surgeon?

Feds salute plucky human ROBOT-FIGHTERS

John H Woods Silver badge

UK Robocalls

In order to get anything done at all (I work from home and have a landline telephone number ending 00xx, so it's early on in the robodial lists for this area) I have an answering machine silently answer all my calls. Messages are off but the announcement informs callers of the VIP code, which will actually cause the phone to ring; not before it tells them it is for the exclusive use of colleagues, friends and family -- and threatens other users with prosecution under the Computer Misuse Act if they proceed (one great thing about the CMA, you can give prosecute unauthorized users even if they know the password).

The machine has paid for itself many times over, fielding around 20-30 calls per working day.

Dropbox cuts cloud storage prices $10 per terabyte, matching Google and Microsoft

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: "1 TB (1,000 GB)"

Oh I'm such an idiot; Muphry's Law again --- 1TB is exactly 1012 bytes

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: "1 TB (1,000 GB)"

"Anyone who does the former [1TB = 1,000,000,000 bytes] should be fired..."

So, that'll be all the official standards bodies? RAM, being addressed in binary, traditionally got expressed using binary k, and disk, not being, traditionally got expressed in decimal k.

Now the official definition is 1TB = 1,000,000,000 bytes and 1TiB = 1,099,511,627,776 bytes. Of course, if someone uses MB, TB etc. to refer to RAM it's safe to assume they're talking MiB and TiB. But otherwise, I'm afraid 1TB really is exactly 109 bytes.

Cleversafe CEO: We would tell you about the 8TB drive, but...

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: genome...

Human genome is about 3 Giga bases - four possible values for a base (A,C,G,T) so that's about 6 Gigabits without compression. Amusingly, that's about the same capacity as a CD! I'd expect an 8TB disk to hold the genome of at least 10,000 people - maybe 100,000 or a million with clever compression.

Raspberry Pi B+: PHWOAR, get a load of those pins

John H Woods Silver badge

The only thing I missed on my B was ...

... a reset switch. Eventually I put a push-to-break in the USB power cable, ugly but functional.

IT blokes: would you say that lewd comment to a man? Then don't say it to a woman

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: The Vagenda ...

The Vagenda isn't man-hating - it's one of the reasons I love it. It's acerbic sometimes, funny and generally inclusive. Even this quote isn't from one of the authors - it's a quote from her (male) friend, whilst the article in which it appears "Running with Wolf Whistles" is actually very positive about the men the author has encountered whilst pounding the pavement.

John H Woods Silver badge

The Vagenda ...

... my favourite feminist blog, contained this pearl recently:

"if IT engineers had to do their work in the middle of the pavement, where we could all see their screens and hear their conversations, we’d quickly stop thinking of builders as the worst misogynists in the village"

Best shot: Coffee - how do you brew?

John H Woods Silver badge

US Coffee

Whenever I have visited, I have been amazed how weak most USians drink their coffee - mainly because they are always going on about how they like it strong and black. Back when I was an academic, we had a visiting US professor who, arriving and complaining of jet lag, asked for "a really strong black coffee". My fellow post-doc, a coffee aficionado even amongst his own Portuguese compatriots, took him at his word and cooked up a 1oz espresso in a mini-bialetti on the lab hotplate.

I will never forget that prof's face as he took a sip! He asked if it could be put in a mug of boiling water and, once it was, he expressed enormous satisfaction with it, and said he had learned a valuable lesson about European coffee!

John H Woods Silver badge

Acidity ...

... if you want less acidity, maybe stay away from the acid coffees (good Kenya AA is so acid it usually curdles any milk added). My personal pref is espresso, I have a bodge-repaired, 14 year old Gaggia that has made >=4 cups a day.

One little hint I found useful for Cona and filter coffee that is standing around - shove a cardamom pod in the filter basket. Gives a nice fragrance and seems to counteract the staling effect. Particularly good for a big after dinner (especially curry!) pot that will be drunk during hours of pointless postprandial persiflage.

True fact: 1 in 4 Brits are now TERRORISTS

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: Infographic Fail

They've quietly changed it.

Don't even THINK about copyright violation, says Indian state

John H Woods Silver badge

Ah, I see ...

It's called the Goondas Act to reflect its authorship, rather than its intent.

iPhone owners EARN MORE THAN YOU, says mobile report

John H Woods Silver badge

In other news ...

... drivers of more expensive cars tend to be in a higher income bracket than those who drive similarly functional vehicles with a less premium brand. Puzzling.

Munich considers dumping Linux for ... GULP ... Windows!

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: More than Outlook

So you need to go contracting put infrequently used / low user count windows-only software on a few VMs or specific servers, and let the users who use it connect via RDP. You don't need a whole new ecosystem for a small number of use cases.

Tricked by satire? Get all your news from Facebook? You're in luck, dummy

John H Woods Silver badge

I can't work out ...

... whether this is serious or not

Who needs hackers? 'Password1' opens a third of all biz doors

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: It's all down to the stupid....

Why not just have this list as part of your complexity rules. In addition to your complexity rules, why not just have a list of (hashes of) forbidden passwords? I reckon the best possible strategy is to allow users to choose anything but to regularly run password crackers on your own user database. Anyone whose password is cracked has to change it.

Murder accused DIDN'T ask Siri 'how to hide my roommate'

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: I'm more impressed

Well, I upvoted. And I've also added DrXym to my "NEVER DOWNVOTE" list.

Password manager LastPass goes titsup: Users locked out

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: Why trust any third party?

d3rrial: "why not use "considerdollarbaseready fARSEbook" as password directly instead of hashing it first? It's not like you're adding anything to the password, that would make it safer, by hashing it"

Theoretically, of course, you are right. Practically, however:

  • some sites don't encrypt passwords (or may have compromised certs) - I don't want to compromise my master password
  • some sites limit password length: (a) the first 16 chars of the hash contain more entropy than the first characters of the password; and (b) all sites which use <=24 chars would have the same password, which I'm trying to avoid
  • some sites "enforce quality" which in practice means a minimum length and certain characters. By using base 64 (and tr where necessary) I can meet these rules without having to use those symbols or numbers in my master password (which, for any given length, reduces its memorability).

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: Lastpass

AC: "I thought TrueCrypt was recently busted wide open?"

It's not quite as simple as that; version 7.1a might be fine :-)

John H Woods Silver badge

Why trust any third party?

I wouldn't trust a third party with my passwords, but I hadn't even considered availability!

I'm sure there's more elegant ways of doing it, but you could reuse a reasonably secure but memorable password with a memorable nickname for the site you need it for, e.g.:

echo -n 'considerdollarbaseready fARSEbook' | sha256sum - | base64 | cut -c -24 | head -1

MDlkNDIwNGZiZTNlOGI1NmQ5

As long as you have a shell and some standard utils, you can reconstruct the password.