* Posts by Ben Norris

192 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Jul 2007

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DVLA website GOES TITSUP on day paper car tax discs retire

Ben Norris

Re: I concur

Aside from people should budget not live from paycheck to paycheck, how many people are paying for 6 months or a year tax out of one months salary? The incentive to pay early is that you save yourself a massive headache waiting in a queue with all the latards or avoid the fine if for any reason you are prevented from paying on that last day.

Hey Brit taxpayers. You just spent £4m on Central London ‘innovation playground’

Ben Norris

Re: Firstly

I think your chances of meeting a real innovator in a place like this are slim to none. BS spewing wannabes, plenty.

eBay promises to refund seller fees after latest MASSIVE OUTAGE

Ben Norris

Refusing to go outside ebay is nothing to do with greed. Not only would they drastically reduce their protection against fraud, but if ebay catches them they will get banned and loose this stream of customers.

Simian selfie stupidity: Macaque snap sparks Wikipedia copyright row

Ben Norris

Re: Good article.

no because said objects are inanimate and the action initiated by a human even if that was the programmer. The monkey has free will.

Brits stung for up to £625 when they try to cancel broadband

Ben Norris

how is this a story?

Customers surprised to find that they are expected to pay what they agreed to pay!

Climate: 'An excuse for tax hikes', scientists 'don't know what they're talking about'

Ben Norris

Science is based on fact, general opinion is not. This survey doesn't say anything about global warming, if anything it shows why democracy is pretty rubbish at dealing with reality or getting anything done.

I very much doubt whether carbon taxes are any use at combatting this but if anything they are a desperate attempt to hold back our increasing demands for power as we are about to go into a period of brownouts and astronomical electricity prices thanks to political heel dragging in commisioning new power plants.

Do you know what the safest, cheapest, most environmentally friendly source of power is? Nuclear. More scientific fact overruled by general populace idiocy and paranoia.

Code Spaces goes titsup FOREVER after attacker NUKES its Amazon-hosted data

Ben Norris

Re: [and you think you're paranoid . . . these folks had belt, ....

Ah but copying around USB sticks is how everyone keeps getting their personal data stolen. Backups need to be offsite but they also need to be kept secure both there and in transit.

Internet of Things fridges? Pfft. So how does my milk carton know when it's empty?

Ben Norris

The scale is built into the shelf and measures all items, you know which were taken because of the rfids. (Not dissimilar to self checkout) Most people have shopping lists already and stick to pretty predictable patterns.

Ben Norris

Actually what is required is not difficult at all. RFID (already in a lot of packaging) says what, some simple scales say how much. Who is going to pay for this? With economies of scale it actually wouldn't be very expensive at all.

Revealed: GCHQ's beyond top secret Middle Eastern internet spy base

Ben Norris

Re: Britain's got secrets

So this inflationary system is where they got the idea for the new a level grades. ;)

WANTED: New head of crashingly expensive, error-prone and frankly cursed one-dole-to-rule-them-all system

Ben Norris

Re: *Theoretically* the idea seems reasonable.

Obviously rules change, any system generic enough should be able to take benefit rule changes in it's stride. We should not need a new IT system every time someone alters a policy!

Dropbox nukes bloke's file share in DMCA brouhaha – then admits it made a 'HASH OF IT'

Ben Norris

Re: I utterly fail to see the problem

What you have failed to account for is that he may well have had permission to share it, eg. within an organisation to do some work. This naive hashing method by dropbox is all or nothing, it completely disregards context.

SCRAP the TELLY TAX? Ancient BBC Time Lords mull Beeb's future

Ben Norris

Re: Just a News Operation

it would in fact mean more of those because those are the BBCs highest earning DVD and overseas brands!

The UNTOLD SUCCESS of Microsoft: Yes, it's Windows 7

Ben Norris

Re: What the hell did they expect?

People learn where stuff is by repetition. The main problem with the start screen isn't that it is touch oriented but that it is dynamic

'No, I CAN'T write code myself,' admits woman in charge of teaching our kids to code

Ben Norris

Re: Few CIOs or VP ITs can code

The point you are missing is that it is exactly the lack of basic coding skill or mere general idea of what it entails in everyday people is the thing that needs to change.

Would you have a writing department in a company led by those who were illiterate? Would you have a company where only a select few could write at all and all work was bottlenecked via them? That is the current situation.

While there will always be the specialist programmers with full understanding , we need to head towards a point where anyone can do basic scripting to automate their own repetitive tasks and a general understanding of what code is/what is possible. (Of course this also requires software to be scriptable and scripting to be as easy as possible - something we have rather thrown out the window in the touch generation)

Reg reader crafts 3-axis GoPro 'Stubilizer' for skull-mounted cameras

Ben Norris

My first thought was that this is just the front off of a TBS discovery, he hasn't invented anything. But on reading on that impression seems to be more of the bad choice by the Reg of exagerating in the headline. Actually it was a pretty interesting article on how to refine a design.

UK.gov recruiting 400 crack CompSci experts to go into teaching

Ben Norris

The point is that this isn't an area of expertise, basic computing is a skill that they all need to know like writing.

Clink! Terrorist jailed for refusing to tell police his encryption password

Ben Norris

Re: Not "complying" is the crime, not the results of complying.

What is wrong with this law is that if you happen to have an encrypted file which you genuinely can't remember or never knew the password of, you can be sent to jail. This is completely against the presumption of innocence.

The reason why you should see something wrong with this is that YOU have a number of files where that is the case on your computer right now.

File-NUKING Cryptolocker PC malware MENACES 'TENS of MILLIONS' in UK

Ben Norris

Re: And why aren't they going after this group??

Will that gate now be officially renamed the plebgate?

Ben Norris

Re: Nasty.

The uptake of android and ios arn't going to mitigate anything. Windows is not the subject of these attacks because it is less secure but because it is more popular. As alternatives become widely used we will and are already seeing more and more attacks against them too. The common factor is the User, not the OS.

UK plant bakes its millionth Raspberry Pi

Ben Norris

We throw away tons of laptops that have screen, keyboard, powersupply, etc. built in. A far more useful exercise than the Pi might be to put a sandbox on them to bring them to a common standard, coupled with a cheap USB IO device. Much more practicle than a classroom of kids huddling round a TV.

Dixons preps home 3D printer for plastic-piping punters

Ben Norris

Re: Does it come with a positive pressure ventilation system?

"levels on par with burning scented candles." yeah big worry!

Also this PLA works out at more like £150/kg rather than the £20-30/kg the stuff normally costs on reels

Autogyro legend Ken Wallis hangs up wings at 97

Ben Norris

Re: Innovation is still alive

Not dead at all. This is what hackspaces are all about. Kids just need the support to learn rather than be plonked in front of a console/tv.

UK mulls ban on tiny mobiles to block prison smugglers

Ben Norris

Re: As far as I'm aware..

Drugs don't have to give off a signal to work though. A few mobile signal detectors around the prison and you can triangulate exactly where phones are being used and go confiscate them. Or would that be far too easy?

Buy a household 3D printer, it'll pay for itself in months!

Ben Norris

A lot of luddites with no imagination here

The finish is not great, does not stop you from prototyping a design with an excellent finish in ceramic, metal or wood from an online service. Also doesn't stop you from making structural replacements for a variety of things where finish doesn't really matter. Whatever happened to the make do and mend attitude?

Manufacturing had moved on to a point where crafting sophisticated parts was out of our hands. 3D printing (and associated software) brings that back to us. Most knowlegeable people are not under the disillusion that this will replace bulk manufacturing, it is a complementary technology. And in it's infancy with lots of room for improvement.

All the commentards here and the OP taking potshots because they don't get it really are the biggest dissapointment.

Microsoft's murder most foul: TechNet is dead

Ben Norris

Re: Peoples simply have a mistaken definition of testing

Yes testing the suitibility of their products, not general testing of your product or environment!

Ben Norris

Re: Grr...

You are talking nonsense. The cheapest level of MSDN is nowhere near 5 grand and if your business is getting so much benefit from access to this software then why shouldn't you be prepared to pay for it as a business cost? Also with virtualisation, spinning up test environments is a matter of copying a few images these days. It shouldn't take more than hours to set up even a complicated environment with scripts.

Ben Norris

Peoples simply have a mistaken definition of testing

Technet was always just for evaluation of products. The only testing it ever included was to see if the MS product was suitable.

What most of you are calling testing, trialing environments, performance, etc. is actually development and as such should always have been covered by MSDN.

If you are a sales partner then the action pack is for being familiar with the products! And the time limited images fill the evaluation gap.

Microsoft arn't taking away a service, they are clarifying a situation that people have been abusing. No you arn't entitled to all their products for next to nothing! What other company offers that?

FLABBER-JASTED: It's 'jif', NOT '.gif', says man who should know

Ben Norris

Re: erm..

the hard g crew are still the minority. They just make so much fuss that it seems the other way. Most people know how to say it correctly

Ben Norris
Trollface

Re: erm..

In the past the register did an inconclusive story to stir up an argument like the trolls they are :) This time the author of the standard is definitively telling you the right way to say it.

Ben Norris
FAIL

Re: “They are wrong. It is a soft ‘G,’ pronounced ‘jif.’ End of story.”

Your logic is incorrect. You don't say JFEG instead of JPEG do you?

Ben Norris

Say JPEG

Say Photographics

Did you say Jay-Peg or did you say Jay-Feg? The argument that it should be pronounced like graphics is invalid.

Ben Norris
Trollface

It was always 'jif'

It is amazing that even in the face of irrefutable evidence of the way it should be pronounced, people still prefer to stubbornly defend their incorrect way rather than admit that they were mistaken.

Yes there are words like giant and gifts that could lead you to pronounce it either way, but as soon as you find out the way it is supposed to be said then you are a fool to continue saying it incorrectly.

Ben Norris

The next thing that will blow your mind is that Gigabyte is also meant to be pronounced Jigabyte. Hence the 1.21 Gigawatts quote from Doc Brown.

giant

ginger

giraffes

gin

gigahertz/byte/watt/etc

gibberish

gipsy

ginseng

giblets

gibe

Smartwatch face off: Pebble, MetaWatch and new hi-tech timepieces

Ben Norris

Understating the Motoactv

Most of theses are just screens or indicators for a host android device. The Motoactv is a fully functional android device in its own right.

Writing it off as a mere fitness mp3 player is pretty shortsighted when the future is more likely to be a miniaturised of that than any of these other glorified screens.

Android device? Ooohhhh, you mean a Samsung phone

Ben Norris

Re: Fragmentation?

Fragmentation is a myth

Ben Norris

Nothing to do with sleek marketing

Everyone wants samsung because they are giving the customer the best experience rather than daft gimmicks and lockins to differentiate themselves.

Queen's Speech: 'Problem of matching IP addresses' to be probed

Ben Norris

The problem with IP addresses is not in identifying the user. Normal people's poor understanding of computing is open to massive abuse as we have seen with media companies harrassing end users with no proof. A list of IPs is not evidence, it is completely open to tampering or total fabrication as well as hacking or spoofing. Even a signed log (which is rarely done) is only as trustworthy as whoever owns the box. The idea that if data came from a computer it must be correct and unrefutable needs to be drummed out of the legal system before you can put in place any fair mechanism.

UK.Gov passes Instagram Act: All your pics belong to everyone now

Ben Norris
Thumb Down

a new unique way of funding the BBC

afterall tv licences are getting a bit outdated now arn't they

Gov.uk named THE BEST THING Britain has made all year

Ben Norris
Thumb Down

rubbish

The endless text links arn't even sorted!

Capita slurps crashed 2e2's ex-flack-in-chief to bolster sales

Ben Norris
FAIL

Yup losing millions and being a miserable failure is pretty much mandatory qualification for government and it's subsiduaries these days. Of course without offering massive bonuses there is no way they could attract such 'cream of the crop'.

AdBlock Plus BLOCKED from Google Play

Ben Norris

Re: fixed it

more importantly developers revenue. Take away their income and you'll end up pushing them back towards only releasing on IOS.

How UK gov's 'growth' measures are ALREADY killing the web

Ben Norris
FAIL

Re: It cannot be invalidated by any subsequent licensing terms.

Nice try but if you had not seen a EULA at any point then you would not have been granted a licence so by default you would be in breach of copyright.

Build your own 180TB NAS for $US1,942.59 (plus disk)

Ben Norris

Not really, remember that this is based more towards archiving with most of the drives sitting idle in power saving mode. It isn't meant to be a like for like replacement for a SAN

Google Drives into web hosting

Ben Norris

Use github as a webhost

...and get free source control built in!

'Build us a Death Star, President Obama' demand thousands

Ben Norris
Pint

Due to internation treaties on weapons in space it would in fact have to be a Fun Star instead

Bash Street bytes: Do UK schools really need the Raspberry Pi?

Ben Norris

The Pi doesn't offer anything over a standard computer with USB. What they need is imaginative programming software/language that is easy to learn but uses the same principals as proper programming. Bottom line is it needs to be quick and easy to see some result and keep them interested.

British Ruby conference cancelled after diversity row

Ben Norris

Re: @Ben

If you read the story, he said NO sponsors pulled out!

Ben Norris
Thumb Down

Precisely, I now have no respect for the organisers due to the fact they paid any attention to a petty comment on twitter, let alone cancel a whole conference over it.

Equality is about equal *opportunity* not jamming black women in wherever possible to make up numbers.

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