Posts by David Harper

Re. How do people fall for this??

As P.T. Barnum once (allegedly) said, there's a sucker born every minute.

It is an ex-parrot, it has ceased to be.

So when will SCO announce the closing-down sale? Anyone want to bid for Darl's executive chair?

Very unwise to annoy the SBS

"It was recently reported that members of the Special Boat Service (SBS) - who are mostly Royal Marines, and so have been on JPA for 20 months - are still suffering problems with their pay."

I really don't think it's a good idea to annoy the Special Boat Service. These guys are the elite of the armed forces, trained to go undetected behind enemy lines and kill with their bare hands. I wouldn't want to be an EDS contractor if the SBS find out who's rsponsible for screwing up their pay.

Almost as careless as HMRC

Substitute "UK Identity and Passport Service" for "Passport Canada" and you have another good reason for refusing to cooperate with the ID card scheme.

It's even worse in the Civil Service

I spent several years in the late 1990s working in the Civil Service, where the annual performance review was a source of constant anxiety and tension. In the Civil Service, you see, your annual appraisal determines the size of your pay rise and also whether you are eligible to be considered for promotion.

As a result, everyone in my institute spent six months of each year getting increasingly paranoid and stressed about their forthcoming appraisal. Once the appraisal was finished, we all then spent six months complaining about the unfairness of the outcome and how our managers had denied us a decent pay rise.

Can someone please explain Andrew Orlowski's anti-Ben Goldacre rant?

Ben Goldacre wrote a piece on the fallibility of biometrics in last Saturday's Guardian (http://www.badscience.net/2007/11/make-your-own-id/), and for his trouble, he was subjected to a bizarre rant by Andrew Orlowski on 27 November in El Reg (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/27/guardian_use_me_as_a_mouthpiece/).

Can someone please explain to me exactly how the points which Goldacre made are substantially different from those highlighted by the six academics, and reported in this article in El Reg?

And why did Orlowski's piece not have a link to enable readers to add their comments?

1 Northern Rock bailout = 40 Type-45 destroyers

At £605m per ship.

If Virgin buys up Northern Rock and pays back the billions that Alastair Darling threw at it, then the Royal Navy could name the first one HMS Richard Branson as a mark of gratitude.

And the Navy could probably buy another couple of dozen destroyers with the savings in Microsoft licence fees, if they ditched Windows For Warships in favour of Linux for Liners.

Poor programming practice either way

"On the project, I clearly remember trying to convince a very talented and skilled developer that using a set of binary flags within an int to hold information about the state of the system was not a good idea. I proposed the use a set of boolean instance variables to do the same thing - each with a meaningful name - within a State object."

You both failed to observe a cardinal rule of developing good Java code, since the actual implementation of the binary flags should never be visible to users of the class. The state of each flag should be exposed only through setter and getter methods. It then doesn't matter whether they are bits in an int or separate boolean variables.

Utter bollocks

"The best television is yet to come. We are entering an age where competition will really start to drive production."

Have you seen the tripe that passes for television on most of the non-BBC channels these days? There's plenty of competition, but we still get dross like "Big Brother", makeover shows, effing celebrity chefs and daytime chat shows.

"Rational economists would argue that if the UK was to realise the greatest economic return from the mandatory investment in the BBC over seven decades, that we would wise to do it before its value starts to fall."

Economists know the price of everything, and the value of nothing. Besides, economists are the biggest source of utter bollocks outside of astrology.

"At present there is a healthy level of support for the BBC - and seemingly, for paying the licence fee. The corporation is seen to provide a pretty good deal given the range of other options on the market."

The licence fee is currently about £11 per month, half the price of the cheapest Sky package. Imagine what the BBC could do if it were able to gouge customers in the same way as Sky or Virgin. And they both get extra revenue from advertising as well. £11 per month is starting to look pretty amazing value, isn't it.

"The assets are impressive. There's the infrastructure - a global network of production and distribution facilities. Then there's the real estate - some of the choicest cuts of property in Central London and beyond."

Aha. The real reason for your privatisation wet dream emerges. The vultures are circling (with due apologies to El Reg) and waiting to pick the poor old BBC's carcass clean.

"Timed correctly, a sell-off would be fiercely competitive and realise massive returns"

Which, in practice, would mean that the Director-General and a few senior executives would line their pockets with millions of pounds, and the rest of the BBC staff would find themselves facing great uncertainty as the newly-privatised company's shareholders demanded cost-cutting to maximise their returns.

The power of Google

I hope that the user-editable Google maps include a drag-and-drop facility. Then we can drag the British Isles closer to the equator during the winter months, and it won't be so dark and damp and dismal.

Re: Don't knock the BBC

Anyone who whines about the BBC licence fee should be made to watch American television for two solid weeks.

Then, if they have any shred of sanity left from the constant exposure to inane, shouty commercials, appalling chat shows and the drivel that passes for news coverage on *any* of the major channels (with the notable exception of PBS, the only non-commercial channel), they might re-consider their opinion of the BBC and realise that a tenner a month is actually rather good value.

@TheThing

"But ... what should Santa say if, in best Xmas tradition, three prostitutes turn up?"

Hello girls! Now, who'd like to sit in Santa's lap!

Why stop at doctors?

One of the most appalling examples of loss of other people's data was the theft last year of a laptop from an employee of the Nationwide building society. The employee had personal data on several million customers, apparently for no better reason than to conduct market research.

The ICO fined the Nationwide almost a million pounds, but since the Nationwide is a building society, that amounted to penalising the customers for the loss of their own data. That's not a deterrent, it's simply an insult to the customers.

If the Information Commissioner were serious about this problem, he would propose that a company's chief executive and chief information officer should both be fined for the loss of customer data. A fine of one pound per customer whose personal data is compromised, should focus their minds on the importance of securing customers' personal data.

@David Simpson

"First, they came for the Jews, and I said nothing, because I was not a Jew ..."

My tenner is already in the post

Pity that the ICO is a paper tiger

Earlier this year, I sought a ruling from the Information Commissioner's Office after I tried to exercise my rights under the Section 10 of the Data Protection Act to restrict the ways in which my bank could use my personal data. This was after the well-publicised theft of one of the bank's laptops containing personal data on millions of customers.

My bank claimed that its terms and conditions exempted it from compliance with a Section 10 instruction, so I made a formal complaint to the ICO.

After a six-month delay, I finally received a letter from the ICO advising me that it could not adjudicate on the matter, and that my only remedy was to take my bank to court to get a legal judgement.

If the government's own regulatory body cannot police the Data Protection Act, what is the point of the ICO? Like the Financial Services Authority, it's a paper tiger.

A state of sin

I'm reminded of the remark by John von Neumann: "Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin."

Rat-arsed pachyderms in Liverpool, too

Many years ago, I lived in a suburb of Liverpool called Woolton. The local pub was The Elephant. After a major refurbishment, the owners decided to mark the re-opening by hiring a real elephant for a day.

This was in the early autumn, and the pub garden had a number of apple trees. There were hundreds of windfalls on the ground, and the elephant began eating them. Unfortunately, many of the apples had already begun to ferment, and the unwitting heffalump soon became quite sozzled. Its keeper was unable to control it, and it went on a rampage around Woolton.

It was probably the most exciting thing to happen in Woolton since the teenage John Lennon and Paul McCartney played at the church fete.

Bring back Wernher von Braun

He might have been an ex-Nazi, but he knew how to build rockets, and he could do it to tight deadlines.

Alas, the likes of von Braun and Sergei Korolev just don't seem to exist any longer.

Another bloody armchair Biggles

I suggest that we strap Dr Andrew Cumming into a Spitfire and let him try his luck against half a dozen trained Luftwaffe pilots in Me-109s.

Of course many RAF pilots couldn't shoot straight. Most of them were barely 20 years old, and they had very little training because the RAF needed rapid replacements for the pilots whom the vastly better-trained and better-prepared Luftwaffe had already killed.

It's not as if Churchill could telephone Goebbels to ask whether the Luftwaffe wouldn't mind awfully *not* bombing the shit out of Britain for a few weeks whilst the RAF trained its pilots properly.

Will e-coffee be provided?

Also e-biscuits. The fancy e-chocolate ones, mind. Not your nasty cheap "family value pack" rubbish.

I only go to seminars that offer free coffee and biscuits. I usually find that I need the caffeine to stay awake beyond the first five minutes of waffle.

Leaving her mark on the world

"I want to leave a mark on the world."

Might I suggest jumping out of a place at 10,000 feet. Without a parachute. That'll leave a mark.

I'm happy with NTL/VM broadband

I've had NTL broadband for almost five years. I'm currently on their 4Mbps service and find it both reliable and fast. Yes, it occasionally slows down a little in the evenings when all of the teenage boys in my neighbourhood are presumably busy downloading pictures of Paris Hilton nekkid, but I understand the concept of contention and I can live with it. Also, I used to be a teenage boy, so I know that their need is greater than mine :-)

Rolling on the floor, laughing my ass off

That's the best news about the national ID system that I've heard in a long time.

Not only is the government shortlisting a bunch of companies which have spectacularly screwed up previous major IT projects, but it looks like the work will be split between several of them, which pretty much dooms the entire thing to utter and complete failure.

The only down side is that the companies involved will end up with billions of pounds of OUR tax money before the project is written off as a disaster.

What kind of sicko plays games like this?

More to the point, what kind of sicko writes games like this?

Re They should keep this quiet

The idea of keeping this quiet is actually quite funny, considering the amount of noise a Vulcan makes when taking off. It makes Concorde seem quiet by comparison.

Flashy 3-D graphics cause global warming

"[Compiz] adds a contemporary feel to the often 1990s looking Linux desktop"

I use Linux precisely because it *doesn't* commandeer 90% of my machine's RAM and CPU capacity simply to render the desktop.

Call me old-fashioned, but my first reaction to flashy 3-D graphics and animation effects is not "Woo! Shiny! I want one!". I'm more likely to think that those CPU cycles could be put to better use.

And since CPU cycles consume energy, I'd even go so far as to argue that flashy desktop graphics contribute to global warming.

@Kristian Walsh

"Of course, had you written this program in Intercal you would not have had this problem"

Provided that you remembered to say "PLEASE" ;-)

Still 404-compliant at 15:02

My browser is reporting that "the redirection limit for the URL has been exceeded".

On the bright side, El Reg is still working :-)

Re: Spelling

Kingston Bagpuss is just up the road from Great Coxwell, which sounds like it ought to be sponsored by the makers of Viagra.

No TV, no licence

@Gordon

You're a little behind the times, Gordon, old chap. The radio licence was abolished in 1971.

According to the web site of the nice people at TV Licensing:

"You need a TV Licence to use any television receiving equipment such as a TV set, set-top boxes, video or DVD recorders, computers or mobile phones to watch or record TV programmes as they are being shown on TV."

There's no mention of radios anywhere on the TV Licensing web site.

More PC World idiocy

I once bought a £25 keyboard at PC World, and the checkout person asked me whether I'd like to buy a £15 three-year extended warranty for it.

PC World -- providing career opportunities for people who aren't quite smart enough to stack shelves at Tesco.

Windows for Warships

IIRC, the U.S. Navy's computer systems are based on Windows.

Surely all that the Chinese have to do is to wait until the U.S. Navy upgrades to Windows Vista and someone in the fleet tries to delete a file.

That's not the Death Star

This is:

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap050308.html

Re Nothing to hide

I hope that Peter Davies doesn't have a close relative who is a career criminal, because there's a statistically non-negligible chance that his DNA "fingerprint" is a close match to that of his father/brother/cousin as far as the police are concerned.

And don't even get me started on the fact that DNA amplification techniques are so sensitive that they could pick up the DNA of any number of innocent people who just happened to have been in the vicinity of a crime scene. We all shed copious samples of our DNA everywhere we go.

Combine that with the eagerness of the police to arrest someone -- anyone -- to boost their performance figures, and the monumental ingorance of the legal profession when it comes to the subtleties of science and statistics, and you have the recipe for an entirely new class of miscarriages of justice based on the "infallibility" of DNA evidence.

What it really means

"The Bill paves the way for the creation of embryos composed of 99.9 per cent human, 0.1 per cent animal DNA."

Let's be clear about this. The "animal DNA" is the mitochondrial DNA of the host cell, not the animal's genomic DNA, which has already been removed, so any talk of "chimeras" or "hybrids" is a lot of nonsense cooked up by people who are either ignorant of modern biology or who are pushing an anti-science agenda.

The mitochondria are the "power plants" of the cell, and the mitochondrial DNA does little more than act as the "computer program" which controls the energy generation within the cell. It plays no role at all in making a human a human, or a cat a cat, or a cow a cow.

Human mitochondrial DNA is only about 17,000 base-pairs ("letters" of the genetic code) long. The mitochondrial DNA of other mammals is a similar size. Compare that to human genomic DNA, which is 3 billion base-pairs long, and you can see that the information content of mitochondrial DNA is tiny compared to genomic DNA. Placed in that perspective, all of the hysteria about human-animal hybrids can easily be seen as the nonsense it is.

Here's another interesting thought about mitochondria. It's been known for more than a century that mitochondria (and their plant counterparts, chloroplasts) bear a striking resemblance to bacteria. In fact, there is a large body of evidence that mitochondria and chloroplasts are actually the descendants of bacteria which invaded the cells of our far distant ancestors and set up a symbiotic relationship. So your mitochondrial DNA isn't really human after all.

A pedant corrects an oddball

May I leap to the defence of the splendid Ms Sherriff, and observe that "its axis almost parallel to the path it takes around our star" is simply one way of saying that the polar axis of Uranus is almost parallel to the plane of its orbit, due to its large obliquity.

In fact, its obliquity is about 98 degrees, which means that Uranus also rotates "backwards" on its axis compared to, say, the Earth.

Are we all happy now?

Smarter than the average bear

If I had a satnav system, I'd program it so that "Home" was my local police station.

Irony

The irony in this story is that the Internet originated in a DARPA experiment to design a wide-area network that could survive a nuclear war. Maybe the affected ISPs should reflect on that, and re-negotiate their peering arrangements so that re-routing happens without the need for human intervention.

Or you could just use Java ...

... and bypass the whole OS-dependency thing altogether.

And your apps would work on Linux too, with no extra work, earning you the love and admiration of penguinistas everywhere.

Funniest share price chart of the year

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=SCOX&t=5d&l=on&z=m&q=l&c=

Friday closing price: 1.56

Monday opening price: 0.45

More James Bond tech

Has anyone else noticed the guy who's about to enter the middle chamber of the mind-probe device?

He seems a little wary of the row of red laser beams. Let's hope they are set on "stun" rather than "slice".

Much more memorable

It's much more memorable than the other two suggestions!

Another paper tiger, like the FSA

Alas, judging from my own recent experience, the Information Commissioner's Office seems to be just another toothless quango, much like the Financial Services Authority, lacking either the will or the power to tackle big business or government agencies on behalf of the ordinary citizen.

Back in February, I filed a request with the ICO for an adjudication on whether my bank's published terms and conditions exempted it from Section 10 of the Data Protection Act, which is the section that allows data subjects to forbid data holders from using personal data in certain ways.

I waited six months to receive a terse response which said, in effect, that the ICO couldn't make any judgement on that kind of question, and that I would have to take my bank to court to settle the matter.

If the ICO cannot rule on the application of the very Act which it was created to enforce, then what is the use of the ICO?

O(n) sorting algorithm?

You quote Kirix founder and president, Nate Williams as saying: "We can sort a million records in a minute; so if you sort a ten million record data base, it takes ten minutes."

If the Williams brothers have discovered an O(n) sorting algorithm, they should sell that instead. After all, the best existing sorting algorithms are O(n log n), so an O(n) algorithm should pretty much guarantee them fame, fortune and the everlasting gratitude of computer scientists everywhere.

Or, of course, he could just be talking bollocks.

What really happened

I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that.

Busking on the Tube?

Does this mean that we're going to see Sir Cliff busking at Oxford Street Tube station? Or maybe Wimbledon High Street is more his style?

Amazon -- more prophet than profit

Amazon did indeed show the world what an online store should look like (and still does), so it's ironic that the company still has not achieved a cumulative profit after a decade of trading.