Posts by umacf24

It's Time

This demonstrates that Turkey is 100% ready to join the European Union.

Now all we have to do is figure out why they want to.

Why use an IC engine?

If you are only charging batteries at a fixed load it seems that the special advantage of IC -- performance under variable load -- is lost. You should be able to get better efficiency from something else. Anyone fancy a gas turbine motor? -- we could fill up with JP1.

"you'll recall the study"

Link or you made those numbers up.

Test? Route to Live?

So -- these are changes to a moderately complex setup that they weren't previously planning to do; they've been set up in a few days work; and they're going to let them loose on production data tomorrow.

Super.

Mobile Massage!

On the Nth wall, just a bit before Pizza Express. Well worth a tenner.

Nervously checks Infosec badge

Cardboard, phew!

Wrong Category

Nothing to do with Space: should be Psychology (20% is too many to call it Psychiatry).

It's a real shame ...

... that the Coen brothers have already done the CIA

Lewis Page

Disintegrator gun correspondent.

Mistaken

I PMd a copy of Banker doing this three months ago -- I thought.

Turned out that it was trying to report to a URL which had been shortened using one of those tinyURL services, and that service itself was hosted on EC2. Because the firewalls were blocking the (unproxied) access to the service, I never saw where it would ultimately have gone.

It's an worthwile technique because the attackers and re-point the URL as and when they see fit.

I presume this has been investigated by competent people and they haven't made the same mistake I did....

Frustrating

I want to be able to play off an SD card, or a USB drive. Daft to make it wireless only. It's surprisingly hard to find a big digital music player.

Not really the first TeV collisions

Cosmic hadrons have been observed to go up to a billion TeV -- that's one proton with the energy of a hammer blow.

Now that would be a particle cannon but unfortunately you seem to need a galactic core to generate those energies.

Fortunately.

possible to have a human check first ....

Why would anyone do that? What could possibly go wrong?

Highly Recommended

I was in Iraq doing a banking system during the first gulf war (Iran vs Iraq) and the tourism was absolutely fabulous.

Babylon has been excessively done up by the late monster, but it's still pretty impressive -- fragments of brick and tile with cuneiform writing underfoot.

Warka/Uruk is left pretty much undisturbed since it was excavated by Germans before the 1st (world) war -- you approach it across plains ruined by salt, and the first glimpse is the huge piles of potsherd. It was inhabited six thousand years ago, Gilgamesh lived there, and I have never encounted such a sense of intimacy with the deep past. You'd need to check that the bridge had been repaired.

Ur was an army base when I was there, but if you drove past slowly and cautiously, you could peep at the ziggurat where, in theory, Abraham's father worshipped.

It might be wise to stay away from Shia holy sites generally for a while and the Najaf shrines were badly bombed by Sunnis so they won't be what they were, but there's a lot to see if you're interested in Islamic art.

Just south of Babylon you have astonishing alexandrene ruins called Ctesiphon. Out in the western desert there's the huge fortress called Ukkhadir (sp. sorry) which is a very mysterious place indeed and leaves you feeling that you'll never lose the taste of limestone on your lips. On the way back there was a modern resort on the banks of a reservoir -- I wonder if that's still there.

Baghdad itself was rather comprehensively done over by the huns in 14-something so there's little left of the caliphate but the museums (Baghdad and Iraqi national) are something else. I hope that Schliemann's (I think it was him) Babylonian treasures are intact.

I never got a chance to go north, but Nineveh and Mosul are apparently well worth a look.

Just saying the names ought to be enough: Nineveh and Uruk, Babylon and Ur. But if you want a reason for a techy to go, how about pointing out that these were the civilisations which invented the 60-second minute or the 60-minute degree (I didn't say you had to like them...) or (in cuneiform) non-pictographic writing?

OK -- if you want to lounge on a beach and pick up a bit of wossname from catford, it's not ideal, but to plant your feet a little more securely as a citizen of Earth it's probably essential. Beat the crowd.

It's perfectly simple

Adopt a time zone where -- as near as convenient -- the sun is at its zenith at noon.

We already have it -- it's called GMT and it lasts all year.

People who don't like the consequences of this are the same people who have problems with the earth being round-like-a-ball. Politicians then, and we must all suffer for their limitations...

it's not 3D TV...

... It's Tri-V. Sky are philistines.

And the IT/Science/Technology/Law issue is......

...... ?

Oh yes: Sad lonely men.

I wonder where I can buy a copy.

Not Bootnotes

It's information security (secure document disposal).

Libet

An eighth of a second is a perceptible delay, so is the machine reading the user's intention before the user is consciously aware of it, and if so, what does that mean?

Where's amanfrommars when you need him?

Refuted?

The MS statement looks like a denial to me. They're only synonyms in US english. A real refutation would be interesting, but a denial is just PR.

Bloody Cabbies

What is the point of riding in a black cab if you can't trust the driver? I hope the PCO tracks him/her down.

Firefox vs Chrome

The difference is that the Firefox update process fails unless you are browsing -- insanely -- as an admin.

Someone has to log on as an admin, download the update again, apply it and clean up the failed applications in the non-admin user profiles.

It's pants. It's why we don't run FF here.

What gives Gus O'Donnell the right....

.... to say that a Minister will be sacked? That's for HM, advised by Mr Happy in No 10.

Special advisors on the Civil Service payroll are fair game though. O'Donnell should sack them all, to preempt any further trouble..

Excellent, well done

Waiting all morning for this.

Firefox Gave Me Malware

Because you can't get the update without running as an admin. I wanted 3.06, the malware was MSAntiSpyware2009 and it took me days to find the poxy drivers it installed.

If they don't want to write a Windows service -- and being cross-platform, I can buy that -- they should offer an updater that windows users could Run As to install the downloaded patch.

I've been wanting to get that off my chest for weeks.

That Database could work.

Databases aren't just tables. That's just Codd.

Way back in 1986 Marek Sergot etc published "The British Nationality Act as a Logic Program" in CACM. That's a list of sentences in symbolic logic, but it's sufficiently comprehensible in English to check, and, get this, it's executable. Any question about the meaning of the law, as written, can be answered by an interpreter. Judges will be left with the external questions "what did parliament (or the minister) mean by leaving this case undefined?, or by using this basic term?" We'll all be a little closer to knowing where we stand.

So count me as one vote for expressing all new law in Horn clauses. Hurrah!

I reckon that's an election winner!

October != December

MS08-067 exploited by Conficker came out a bit late in October and they switched off the patching at the end of December .... so that's err more than nine weeks to patch?

Wrong User Agent

IE8 users just need to change their User Agent to "Mozilla ..."