Posts by Chris Miller 3550 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Apr 2007
have been around since the 50s. They've never been able to compete commercially with fossil-fuel power, but watch this space. MVs typically burn the cheapest, nastiest form of fuel available - basically the scrapings after all the usable petrol/diesel/fuel oil/jet fuel has been extracted. The pipes that carry the fuel from the tanks to the engines have to be heated, otherwise the fuel remains solid.
Buckinghamshire County includes Wycombe, Aylesbury Vale, South Bucks and Chilterns district councils (Milton Keynes is a unitary authority) - they are not 'neighbouring' councils. As with many county councils, it is a provider of some central services (such as payroll) to some or all of these districts.
None of these councils, from my experience, have the IT capability (much of it already outsourced) to run a whelk stall. I ask again: if you can't manage your own IT properly, what on earth makes you think you can manage an independent provider (whether in the 'cloud' or elsewhere).
Only if you consider New England to California 'short haul' - the flights were deliberately selected to have a large amount of fuel on board. And the building withstood the impact very well (as, indeed, would most similar constructions) - the problem was that the impact stripped most of the fireproof covering from the steel, which was then weakened by the subsequent conflagration.
"the only steel-framed highrises IN HISTORY to collapse in this fashion without the aid o high explosives were WTC 1, 2 and 7"
Do you think that this could possibly be related to the fact that two of these neighbouring buildings were the only ones IN HISTORY to be struck at high velocity by heavy passenger jets fully laden with fuel?
And there are "official" conspiracy theories? Who knew??
"People are willing to accept any negative assumption about politicians", probably true of many people. Certainly the one thing most of us won't accept is any degree of competence in their ability to cover up even the simplest things, such as their abuse of expenses.
I find it hilarious when people construct swivel-eyed conspiracy theories requiring the absolute silence of tens of thousands of people in disparate and competing organisations and assume that only they can have a handle on reality.
A working fusion reactor is a mechanism for producing energetic neutrons. We have no idea how such neutrons can be converted into usable energy safely and effectively (i.e. over the decades long lifetime of a power plant). There is little research going on into this topic, because no-one has yet built a working fusion reactor. Once they do, we'll be into another (probably decades long) research programme.
There was a good article on this topic in the March 2010 Scientific American (behind a pay-wall):
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=fusions-false-dawn
there is a not dissimilar effect. Digital recordings seem to feel they must demonstrate the *full* dynamic range available. So anything marked pp is played pppp; and ff becomes ffff. While this may sometimes sound terrific in the quiet of your own listening room, playing it in a noisy environment (such as a car) becomes a problem. You turn the volume up as you strain to catch the quiet passages, only to have your eardrums assailed by the louder bits.
I think ClassicFM apply compression to their broadcast signal, to reduce this problem.
No smog in UK since 1950s, Thames now running with salmon and otters, very few workers now poisoned. Perfection remains elusive, but life is far, far better for almost everyone living in a modern industrialised society than it was (is) for almost everyone who doesn't.
If you like agrarian economies so much, why not try living in one? There are plenty of examples in Africa.
These clowns weren't around 200 years ago: "hey man, I know this industrial revolution thingy looks really cool, but is it sustainable - have you thought of the effects on our grandchildren?"
And today we'd all* be working from dawn to dusk in the fields trying to get a damp harvest in, and living on a turnip-based diet. But at least it would be 'sustainable'.
* nearly all, unless you were lucky enough to be born a wealthy landowner.
Not "Can clouds ever be fully secure?" - nothing can ever be 'fully' (100%) secure. Even getting to 99.99% imposes such costs (in implementation and impact on performance and usability) that most businesses would be silly to try to achieve it - leave that for the NSAs and GCHQs.
The correct question is: "Can clouds ever be secure enough (for our needs)?". To which the obvious answer is that it depends on what your needs are. If you're an aforementioned security agency, probably not. For most organisations, the answer will be a definite 'maybe'.
So: carry out a risk assessment to identify what your security needs actually are; choose a supplier that can demonstrate their ability to provide an appropriate level of security (by certification or through your own due diligence); negotiate a contract with appropriate safeguards and penalties - and Robert is your parent's brother.
Err, isn't that the job of the IT (sorry, ITC, we're dealing with local government after all) dept? (Assuming it hasn't been outsourced to Crapita.)
Every parcels van is now accompanied by a hand-held on which you can sign for delivery. I don't see many of them using iPhones or iPads, instead they prefer something more rugged that will last longer than a week. But then, they have to operate in the commercial world, rather than the rarefied atmosphere of spending other people's money.
If I can add to the paean of praise, he was also 'Q' - or, at least, Principal Scientific Officer at MI5*.
I trust there are folk at BP who can keep Colossus running, but what will we do when the valves eventually run out? Better go and see it working while you still can!
* Yes Bond was at MI6, but still ..
Right-click on the menu line, select 'hide ribbon'. There, that wasn't too painful was it? And an actual *gain* in screen real estate.
The ribbon represents a significant improvement in UI. You can right-click on any operation and place it into a 'quick-access toolbar' at the top of the screen. Of course, you have to *tell* your users about the changes. Far too many organisations just roll out the next release without any thought given to training ("everyone knows how to use Word/Excel"), with the result that most people are wasting half their screen space. Typical 'penny-wise, pound foolish' attitude of modern management.
"I don't think there is another human being on the planet who has been more influential in the last 30 years on the way culture has developed."
"There are few more important people on the planet, and if I had said that 10 years ago you'd have thought I was completely insane."
Stephen, you're completely insane. Five minutes more of luvvy gushing (sickbag strongly advised) here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-14661845
You think the Amtrak timetable is reliable enough to judge whether you'll be passing a given point during the day or night? Oh, my aching sides!
Seriously though, if this journey were ever possible (and, if so, I'd love to take it), the shortest and fastest route would be across Canada to Toronto and then on down the Hudson Valley to NYC. So replace 'Nebraska' with 'Saskatchewan' and cows with 'wheat', and my comment stands.
The view from the tracks in China can be fascinating, but the Trans-Siberian consists of a week spent watching birch trees going past 5m from the window - an exercise in sensory deprivation or a vodka-drinking contest depending on how you want to play it. Transcontinental US is much more varied and interesting and the double-deck Superliner observation cars provide a very good view (and the food is much better), but even then there's a lot of:
"Are we still in Nebraska?"
<Glances out of window at another bunch of cows>
"Yup."
Although it is possible to change track gauge on the move, as happens at the French/Spanish, Polish/Ukraine and Swedish/Finnish borders.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_gauge
Loading gauge just means running to the lowest standard (the UK being the worst case), but HS1 is built to continental standards.
There are no rails anywhere close to Nome - indeed Alaska is not connected to the North American rail network. And I'm not sure the position is much better on the Russian side - it's a long way to Yakutsk (~2,000 miles). So it's a bit more complicated than 'merely' building a 65-mile tunnel (though that would surely be the most technically demanding part).
I think the initial idea would be to transport by road up to the railheads on each side. I wouldn't count on being able to take the train from St Pancras to Grand Central for a little while yet!
The anorak, please ...
"if all the 70-odd million chargers in use worldwide were swapped out for Green Zeros it would save 47 million tons of carbon dioxide a year"
Let's see if that's true. According to the Carbon trust, 1kWh of electricity releases 545.22g of CO2 into the atmosphere (not sure how they can be so precise, but anyhoo ...). Osun are saying that each charger is responsible for around 630kg of CO2 each year - that's 1,265kWh, or 3.465kWh per day. That means (even assuming every charger is left plugged in 7x24 - I'm sure *some* of them must be, but mine certainly aren't) an average of 150W, which is within the bounds of credibility, but sounds high to me.
/^v.+b$/i
No, quantum computing will wreck some current public-key systems, because it allows fast factorisation. It will effectively halve key-length for symmetric encryption schemes (leaving them still, mostly, effective). Nicked from Bruce's blog:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/08/new_attack_on_a_1.html
I'm not privileged to move in cryptographic circles, but I dare say that as a security specialist I have more dealings with cryptography than the average reader of ElReg; and I had never come across this strange reversal of the normal English usage of 'compromised' and 'broken'. I don't think the chaps in Hut 7 at Bletchley spoke of breaking Enigma, meaning they'd reduced its security by a couple of bits. So no-one should be surprised if, on a general IT web site, readers are confused by this odd terminology.
Anyway, accepting your and DanG's definition, AES has been 'broken' since at least 2009, so shouldn't the headline read 'rebroken'?
No, AES is not 'broken'. This is a very clever attack, but it only makes it 5x better than brute force (which, for a correctly implemented encryption scheme would take billions of years of computer power). To quote from the abstract: "In this paper we present a novel technique of block cipher cryptanalysis with bicliques, which leads to the following results:
* The first key recovery attack on the full AES-128 with computational complexity 2^126.1.
* The first key recovery attack on the full AES-192 with computational complexity 2^189.7.
* The first key recovery attack on the full AES-256 with computational complexity 2^254.4.
* Attacks with lower complexity on the reduced-round versions of AES not considered before, including an attack on 8-round AES-128 with complexity 2^124.9."
As Bruce Schneier puts it: "there is no reason to scrap AES in favor of another algorithm, NST should increase the number of rounds of all three AES variants. At this point, I suggest AES-128 at 16 rounds, AES-192 at 20 rounds, and AES-256 at 28 rounds."
You launch a new, me too, product into a market with a dominant incumbent and make it the same price (if not a bit more expensive). It fails to sell in significant numbers, so you introduce a tweak at an even higher price?
Despite its (arguable) superiority to the iPad in some respects, it's surely obvious that it needs to be substantially cheaper to stand the slightest chance. If that means taking a loss until you can build up some volume sales, that's the price you pay to be in the game. If you don't want to pay it, don't play.
It has not been tried and found wanting, it has been found difficult and left untried (as Chesterton put it). Now we're looking at dozens of cores on a chip, but can we make effective use of them? On a server supporting multiple independent sessions (and probably with some VM going on as well) we can - but in a desktop or a supercomputer dedicated to one task?
is more secure than one with 4 different digits (36 possible combinations against 24) - though you can also get a hint to the order of the digits from the size of the thermal imprint. Of course, you could just hit a 5th extra key (which I -think- the ATM will ignore) and give them 120 possibilities to play with.
Cunning stunt, though.
Though I well remember Bennett in 1970 as a spectacular naked eye object (West in 1976 was brighter, but not as well placed for viewing). Since then, they've mostly been fuzzy blobs - even through binoculars. We're overdue for a good one.
But we should also remember that night skies were much darker before 20th century street lighting, and that we rely on "artists' impressions" for older comets.
Well, independence means the Labour party would never be in power again and the Tories are the Conservative & Unionist party (the clue's in the name). Why do you think no-one ever asks the English if we'd like to keep subsidising the moaning minnies north of the border? And there won't be a vote for independence in Scotland because:
a) turkeys don't vote for Christmas; and
b) if there's one thing Highlanders* hate more than an Englishman it's someone from Edinburgh.
* and pretty much everyone outside Lothian.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
