Posts by Tom Wood 549 publicly visible posts • joined 14 May 2008
A significant chunk of taxi business happens in the small hours of Friday and Saturday nights (and other nights especially at this time of year). How is a driverless car going to fare in such circumstances?
Will be fun when the first gang of drunken students manages to take a driverless car hostage and turn it upside down or something...
I think the theoretical savings come from not having to send someone round to read the meter.
Not that anyone ever reads ours since they always come during working hours. They leave a card asking us to read the meter and put the card up in the window for them to check the next day, then it shows up on the bill as an actual meter reading and presumably the meter reading guy gets paid as if he really did read it.
Indeed, though that's not really the point though, is it.
Though I'm lost as to the part about being able to verify the work with a classical computer. The whole reason factorisation problems are useful for cryptography is that the factorisation is hard, but the opposite, multiplication, is easy. So it should be trivial to verify the work by multiplying the factors together with a classical computer (or, in the case of 11 and 13, in your head).
Presumably no retailer that competes with Amazon wants to use Amazon's cloud services to build a scalable website, so maybe it is understandable, if not particularly acceptable, for them to hit issues. (Curry's queue isn't great, but at least it's better than falling over in a heap).
But if Amazon themselves can't make their website scale to fully meet the demand it doesn't say much about their own brand of cloud computing...
Leeds certainly fits the category of "big city", though the stats make it look bigger than it is because of the way the city council areas are defined. Leeds City Council covers a large area including outlying towns like Otley (which is obviously not really part of the city of Leeds, it's separated by a fair chunk of green space). Whereas for instance Manchester City Council only covers the most central parts, while areas that are obviously within the same conurbation are parts of different local authorities (Salford, Trafford, etc).
On the flipside of this coin - I'm a software engineer who is frequently asked to review CVs for applications.
It's actually often quite hard to give precise feedback on the reason for rejecting a CV. It will normally be a whole number of factors. It's a bit like walking down a street in an unfamiliar city trying to pick a restaurant - there may be some absolute reasons for rejecting a place (too expensive, not the sort of food you are after) but often there are other reasons that by themselves sound trivial or judgmental but overall give you a bad impression (looks a bit dodgy, smells funny, decor doesn't look nice, menu has bad spelling, ...). Would you want to have to explain your reasoning to the proprietor of every restaurant you turn down?
It's not. If you had the right tools and steel, you could make a metal gun, as the article says.
The whole "aarhgh this is terrible" angle to the concept of a 3D-printed plastic gun was that it wouldn't show up on x-rays at airports and suchlike, whereas a metal gun would. But if it was plasticy enough not to show up on an x-ray, it would also be useless as a gun.
With 4G there isn't really much call to use wifi in public (bars, train stations etc) in the UK. In fact I use wifi hotspots mainly when abroad and trying to avoid data roaming.
Besides, quality is better than quantity - those hotspots that make you do some elaborate sign-up dance (involving handing over an email address to allow them to spam you) for which you are rewarded with a rather mediocre connection are barely worth using.
I have an early (2010 or 2011 model) Toshiba "smart" TV - it was never that smart but did have a iPlayer and youtube apps.
Recently the BBC discontinued the iPlayer service that was used by my TV so the app no longer works.
Toshiba have had no updated firmware available since I bought the TV in 2011 - I guess once they've sold the TV, they aren't interested any more.
So, for now we need to use a laptop to get iPlayer through the TV, and the "smart" TV is basically "dumb" again.
At the moment I get Broadband from BT - basically the same people who manage the wires, the street cabinet and the exchange. It seems to work okay. Why add a middleman (EE) with no Broadband delivery experience?
Because it's cheaper.
I get TV from Freesat - plug it in and point it at the sky and it works. Why faff around with something more complicated. If I want to record stuff, I can buy a recorder. I don't, so I won't.
Freesat is arguably more complicated than Freeview, which works with the same aerial that's been on your house for decades.
Just because you don't want a recorder doesn't mean nobody else wants one.
My TV already has a remote. Why would I want to faff around using a phone to control the TV?
That is a good question. Because many people already watch TV with a phone in their hand?
Why would I be watching a programme on my phone when there's a TV in the room?
Because their isn't a TV in a different room?
Now you/your kids/your grandkids can watch TV from their bedroom / the garden / the toilet without needing to install another TV (along with aerial cabling etc) in those places.
I send an email order to a small business from a legitimate email address that I have had for getting on 20 years and actually paid for. Gmail silently drops it as spam.
The "from" address is irrelevant (in spam, they're fake).
Did you send it through a legitimate and correctly configured mailserver? Does the mailserver have valid reverse DNS entry? Is it allowed by the SPF record for the sending domain? Is your server configured as an open relay or has it for some other reason found its way into one of the big DNS blocklists?
There's a whole bunch of ways your "legitimate" email server could be mis-configured so that it looks to Gmail like you're a likely spammer.
Right, message submission (to the ISP's mailserver or your own external one) should use port 587 for SMTP (including using STARTTLS) or port 465 for SMTPS. Port 25 should be restricted for message relaying/delivery which most customers of a domestic ISP have no call to do. Those that do need it should have to ask for it to be enabled and can then be monitored by the ISP more closely.
I don't agree about HTML mail though, that definitely has its uses.
If the ISPs hosting these botnet-infected machines blocked port 25 (as many/most UK ISPs do), the spam couldn't spread anywhere near as easily. Most spam my mailserver receives comes from domestic connections outside the EU/US which are clearly from botnet infected machines that shouldn't be operating a mailserver.
You're right. If they can steal the safe then it doesn't matter whether it's made from cardboard or plywood or hardened steel, they will find a way to attack it.
The problem consumers have is that they are trusting their passwords to a safe of unknown quality surrounded by an unknown number of guards who may or may not be unfit and unable to run very fast and prone to fall asleep on the job.
Security is only as strong as its weakest link, so given that we don't know how careful websites are with their password security (recent incidents would suggest: not very) we should still follow all the usual rules (long complex passwords, don't reuse them, etc).
In the old days perhaps the best reason for not taking photos of your embarrassing bits (aside from the more obvious concern that nobody wants to see *that*) was that the lady behind the photo counter in Boots would get to see them.
Now, just replace that lady behind the photo counter with someone at Google/the NSA/The Sun and you still have exactly the same good reason for not taking photos of your embarrassing bits.
or is your proofreader on holiday?
"X86 CPU and Radeo graphics chipper AMD has come out with an SSD line using Toshiba/OCZ componentry.
It's called the Radeon R7-Series, which us a sideways extension of existing graphics processor branding."
and that's just in the first two paragraphs. This isn't the first article today that's contained pretty glaring errors.
It's not quite that simple.
Imagine Netflix content is delivered by the lorryload to your home from a Netflix factory on the other side of the country.
You pay your local council to maintain streets and local roads that connect your home to the motorway network.
Netflix pay their local council to maintain the streets and local roads that connect them to the motorway network.
The question here is about who pays to maintain the motorway network. It's full of lorries carrying Netflix content. Netflix are effectively arguing that your local council should pay to build a new motorway linking them to the Netflix factory, or at least to the motorway junction very near their factory; or alternatively your council should pay for the land and infrastructure and ongoing costs required to have Netflix build a new factory in your town. Your local council are unsurprisingly arguing that Netflix should pay to build and maintain the motorway as far as the motorway junction near your town, or at least pay the rent and infrastructure costs for Netflix to build that factory in your town.
In most similar disputes, traffic flows more or less equally in both directions, so the answer is normally for both parties to split the cost between them. However, as this particular motorway will need many more lanes heading from the Netflix factory to your town than in the other direction, the argument is not so clear cut.
Disputes like this are going to run and run...
@Amorous Cowherder
Did you actually read how this works? The cat is detected using a simple PIR sensor (as used for security lights, burglar alarms etc) not any fancy image processing. PIRs have the advantage of detecting only warm bodies (like cats and people) not trees moving etc.
The webcam is just for fun, and for calibrating the system.
I assume Jess means using the same PIR and valve but with a simple timer to let the hose run for a short while after the PIR fires (similar to how a security light works).
That would be a fairly simple electronics project, and would work, but you wouldn't get the fun videos - which he mentions help to set up and calibrate the system as well as providing endless amusement.
Indeed. Wireshark and tcpdump both use libpcap for the actual capture of traffic. tcpdump is a command line frontend, ideal if you want to run a packet capture for a period of time then analyze it later (perhaps with Wireshark). Wireshark allows real-time capture and analysis (using libpcap) but also offline analysis of saved captures.
libpcap allows highly configurable capture filters to reduce the size of the packet capture by discarding stuff you don't need (such as filter by protocols, hosts, only capture packet headers and discard the payload, etc).
To capture traffic from all the PCs though you either need to run a capture on each individual PC or on the switch/router/gateway. You can only intercept the traffic where it passes and ordinarily one PC won't see traffic destined for another PC.
mobile phone companies could buy vast numbers of large scale video screens and then sell advertising space on them. ...
Mobile operators who feel that they have lost what they regard as core revenue, from apps to new entrants, may well feel motivated to try the field of media sales but will find winning the hearts and minds of advertisers very much harder than they expect.
Why would this technology require the phone companies to buy the video screens?
There are already video screens that show advertising. They're operated by advertising companies who also run more traditional billboards too (JCDecaux, Clear Channel, Exterion etc). Presumably they get the content to them somehow already. Maybe LTE Broadcast will provide a better way of getting content to the billboards but why would the mobile phone companies want to start buying billboards themselves? Wouldn't they just offer LTE Broadcast as a service to the existing billboard companies (assuming they want it...?)
"Coding" suggests a mechanical process of converting sense into almost-nonsense; encryption by hand if you will. No wonder people think it's boring.
Software engineering should be anything but mechanical. One of my favourite quotes about computing is from Turing: "Instruction tables will have to be made up by mathematicians with computing experience and perhaps a certain puzzle-solving ability. There need be no real danger of it ever becoming a drudge, for any processes that are quite mechanical may be turned over to the machine itself."
That's a rule for any programmer to live by - if you find your work becoming a drudge, write a program to do it for you (see also: compiler, automated test harness, etc...)
To encourage people to become interested in computer science and software engineering, we need to really sell it on that "certain puzzle-solving" aspect, not on "coding"
If we all switched to Tesco, Three or O2 would we be any better off Folks?
No. This is about fibre networks. BT and Vodafone (the former Cable & Wireless business) are the UK's biggest operators of fibre networks so it's hardly surprising they get the most money for allowing their networks to be tapped.
Well that just perpetuates the myth that IT is run mainly by men that live with their mum and can't get a girlfriend.
Actually, it doesn't. The guy who wrote the slide has a girlfriend. If she's anything like my financee (yes, I work in IT too, and I don't live with my mum: take that, myth!) she'd probably laugh about it. Normal people in normal relationships can and do have a bit of a joke with each other, often at the other's expense.
Whilst we shouldn't hang him for the stupid slide we shouldn't applaud him either.
Exactly. We should ignore it. At the very most be British and tut to ourselves a bit.
My point was a wider one around freedom of speech and the effect of twitter/Daily Mail created false outrage. When talking to a restricted audience, it is good to be able to engage with your audience and share a joke on the understanding that everyone within the room knows it's a joke. The only people entitled to take offence are those in the room. But now speakers face the risk that it will be taken out of context by people who are not in the room and used to whip up a frenzy. Which is surely going to have the effect of making public talks much more bland.
we don't live in the old days...public speaking, by very nature is public
Indeed, but that doesn't mean we have to throw out all the interesting variety of discourse we used to have and replace it with bland drivel for fear of upsetting absolutely anyone on twitter. Yes, it's public speaking, but it shouldn't mean the speaker has to expect some twit to strip a snippet of the speech from all surrounding context and lay it before other twits to pass judgment.
when this went out into the twatosphere others other than tech heads will of been made aware of it
And that is what's wrong with twitter, and the Daily Mail. They seem to think it's acceptable to take something out of a closed context, wave it around in public, and shout "LOOK AT WHAT THESE PEOPLE ARE DOING! YOU SHOULD BE OUTRAGED AND JUDGE THEM". Even though you weren't there, and you weren't in the target audience.
In the old days this would never have left the conference room, and that would have been that.
A public speaker now has to consider not just his actual intended audience, but any little twit who knows nothing of the context but everything about being judgmental about things he has no right to judge. Which can only make public speaking worse.
Not because of that guy's slides, but because of their response to it.
Someone makes a joke which rehashes an old stereotype but really, isn't offensive at all. It's mildly amusing but slightly tiresome at the same time. Other than that it's an irrelevance and it should have been immediately forgotten about.
Some twit with a cameraphone tweets the joke rather than just ignoring it as he should have done.
Other twits on Twitter respond to the first twit, in the way twits like to do, rather than just ignoring it as they should have done.
Finally, Atlassian make the mistake of feeding the twitty trolls rather than just ignoring it, as they should have done.
I found this on Street View the other day. This is outside Virgin Media's headend/depot in Leeds:
https://maps.google.com/maps?q=seacroft+leeds&hl=en&ll=53.826635,-1.460538&spn=0.003175,0.006228&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=48.956293,102.041016&t=h&hnear=Seacroft,+West+Yorkshire,+United+Kingdom&z=18&layer=c&cbll=53.826139,-1.461179&panoid=ZpYnpZSDlgJ_R2Oudao2qA&cbp=12,57.36,,0,6.01
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