Posts by Dave Bell

A lot of what might be called "support" has been privatised.

A good many jobs on offer are never seen by the DWP systems.

And their computer-based system has real trouble with pinning down where a job might be. I've seen them class jobs in Swansea as local to Scunthorpe. I can understand a confusion between where a company office might be and where the job is, but it's still bad design.

I don't think DWP really knows what is happening, or how to find out.

I've seen several different sorts of ticket used. Some are meant to be displayed on the car's windscreen while it's parked, which would rather put the kybosh in this idea. It depends on the ticket being provided at an entry barrier. But there's no reason why the ticket can't have a clearly visible number. We seem happy enough to use a 4-digit PIN for payment cards, though this would clearly need a longer number.

I don't think ticket printing is the fundamental problem. It's whether the overall system can link a ticket to a vehicle. Most of the car parks I know would struggle to do that, because the driver has to park, and walk to a ticket machine to collect the ticket.

It's not quite simple, but I think we are suffering from programmers who haven't adequately coped with the changes in the technology.

Computers used to get more powerful by running at a higher speed. That hit some practical barriers, and the response was the multiple-core processor. You get some gain just from the OS running on one core and the program running on another, and that's easy to do.

I can point to software, written in the last three years, able to use a lot of CPU power, which is still stuck at that crude level of multi-core use. Luckily, a lot of the work the program does can be handled by the graphics hardware, but the performance seems biased in favour of a particular GPU manufacturer.

Add the way that it grabs all the RAM it can, and that there is no 64-bit version (that might be an advantage, since it limits the RAM it can grab), and you have an indication of how programmers are failing to exploit the increased hardware speed.

And my fancy multi-core desktop monster doesn't really improve things for writing this comment. I don't type any faster. OK, so it has a bigger screen and a better keyboard than my netbook, but the feeble CPU isn't the limit on what I do.

We have too many programmers producing badly-implemented usage of processing power. I'd far rather see some smart exploitation of the falling energy costs. I used to run an office on a 1 GB hard drive, with plenty of storage space to spare. Now a memory storage device that small is becoming a little hard to find. But is the energy cost of storage reducing in a useful way when a similar physical device can store 2 TB. "Laptop" drives, of course. It does seem that cheap laptops are where people are spending their money, these days, and they are hugely powerful computing machines. They are saving energy, but they don't do so much more on a battery charge. We don't type any faster.

I don't mind having these huge hard drives. But Parkinson's Law seems to trump all else about computing. With a touch of the Peter Principle.

The problem is that English is a moving target.

Considering what some teachers have tried to do to the language, that would seem to be an inevitable survival tactic.

More than pathetic

The thing is, LS&Co don't seem to have bothered to explain to the Judge why, under the American laws, he even has jurisdiction. It's not about the merits of their complaint: they didn't bother to explain why a court in Europe couldn't be trusted to enforce the laws of Europe.

But some lawyers will have run up billable time over this.

A solution for other reasons

A ,com mirror, or a ,eu mirror, would make sense as part of a general strategy of protecting against failures. You have back-up servers in another location, and you have back-up name servers and domains.

Oh, I can see the point about needing to protect against fast-happening crimes: imagine an event like the HP fondleslab sale being a fraud, You'd have a couple of days after taking the money to do a runner, before people got suspicious. But I can't see the system being able to react fast enough.

I think this is something dangerous (and the police have always had tame Magistrates who can be depended on to issue warrants in the "right" sort of case). It needs some pretty strong checks, with statutory backing.

Stolen Goods

I doubt the circumstances protect her from a stolen goods charge. In England, there are a few get-outs based on "open sale", but it doesn't sound as though they'd apply, even if the law was the same.

With local experience...

The maps locally are mostly white--nobody has used an an Android phone with the software--though the pattern along the local motorway looks consistent with my experience.

I know where the local transmitters are, as there is a cluster of transmitter masts, and the signal drop-outs are consistent with that being the site.

The patterns do suggest that people with Android phones don't live or work in rural England. I would guess that a lot of the blanks would be a green fill, depending on the landscape. But nobody goes to the middle of a field to check.

Ammunition boxes.

There is a story that part of the problem was than the ammunition supply faltered, because the reserve ammunition boxes couldn't be opened without screwdrivers.

They'd been designed so that they could be smashed open with a rifle butt,

The extended formation didn't help in distributing ammunition.

ECHR and EU

The ECHR isn't part of the EU: it's one of several Europe-wide things which have come to heavily overlap the EU. We're one of the countries which set up the ECHR, before the EU (or EEC as it was) ever came into existence.

There's people who do seem to like mashing all these different things together. I'm not at all sure of their motives in doing so, but blaming the ECHR on the EU is one of their usual lies.

HMS Dreadnought

The point about HMS Dreadnought was that it changed the way naval battled were fought. Even with the same guns on both ships, the Dreadnought "system" had the advantage of a greatly increased effective range. The steam turbines also made the ship faster, which meant it could control the range the battle was fought at,

Only thing is, one ship can't fight a fleet. And other countries had ships being built on the same principles when HMS Dreadnought was launched. So it wouldn't have made much difference if HMS Dreadnought hadn't been built. The rest of the British fleet would have been just as obsolete. And Britain would have to have built new battleships.

Insurance

There's quite a few things which an insurance company doesn't cover, nuclear bombs for one. It doesn't mean there's no compensation, since the compensation may be paid by the Government.

In the case of Riot, the Insurance company, if they pay out, can claim compensation from the Police. There was talk of replacing the Riot (Damages) Act, a few years ago, but that Act still seems to be in force. And, if you're not insured, you can make a claim yourself.

One obvious example: a lot of vehicles are insured third-party only, and so if they were damaged or destroyed there would be no insurance cover. But the owner could put in a claim to the Police Authority. If they had insurance cover that did apply, they would get a payment from the Insurance Company, who could then claim from the Police Authority.

It surprised me. But all those IRA bombs: the Government paid compensation.

That's the problem

I can't quite make things add up.

It's quoted as being able to fly at 22,000 feet but I'm not sure how long it can stay in the air. That's an electric motor powering the propellor, and that needs a battery. So do the electronics, and there's a lot more there than a control system. Also, you have a fixed-pitch prop, not so good over such a great altitude range.

Anyway, the altitude records I can find for electric model aircraft are well below the claim.

That sounds bizarre

Just how far along the chain would that end up going. What's next? The customers of the PR companies who are Meltwater's customers having to buy a licence?

The design is not the object

OK, some of those airliners flying are very old. And they get detailed inspections and thorough maintenance. Soyuz (and its launcher) are built new for each flight.

The ISS is rather more difficult to check and maintain. As it gets older, the crew will be spending more and more time on just keeping it running.

"It's old and can't be fixed" is inevitable, and then you de-orbit the ISS.

Whether it's the politicians refusing the money, or just the pointlessness of flying astronaut-plumbers, the ISS project will end.

It is a bit of a stretch...

I'm a little bit surprised by the use of that regulation in this case. Great if it could scare Google back to their senses, but every time the law is stretched to cover a borderline case it can drag in instances we don't expect.

Contracts are sometimes not obvious, and the term is an exchange of value. This could be another one of those dangerous stretches of the law, but I think it's long since being settled. The data that Google is requiring does have a value. Google are creating a mailing list, and they can sell the use of that list.

The problem is that Google don't have to have an RL name to have an identity that can be sold to advertisers.

It is all down?

I was getting some access yesterday. I see good times and bad times, so maybe location, time, and load, all make a difference.

One reason why it's so easy

You can't get an engineer to a satellite, so it's handy to be able to use the same tricks as the pirates. You keep the security in a place where you can repair it

Payments?

I didn't think you could pay for goods online which were not shipped to the card-holder's address.

Same here

That pretty well summarises my experience.

I rather think that the chances of getting good support from any ISP or telephone retailer is getting pretty slim.

Another word from TV sci-fi?

I think "shiny", in this context, can be traced back to the short-lived TV series Firefly. A piece of invented slang that found a real-world use, a sort of tech-oriented "cool".

Something odd here

"I've heard a few journos over the last few days admit that they've had no training on what's legal or ethical in investigations, and their papers don't have rules to consult. So it's all down to gut feeling, what the editor allows afterwards, or you can get away with."

Yet I hear of new journalists being expected to have degrees in Journalism.

Isn't this sort of necessary knowledge part of the degree course? If it isn't, it ought to be.

They Already Do

It's called "Driving Under The Influence", and the only difference between alcohol and everything else is that they have some specific, measurable, limits for alcohol.

The value of speculation

I do think speculation is far too large a part of modern financial and commodity markets, but there are good reasons for having it. Putting it at the most simple, speculators, buying and selling, mean that when "real" deals are done, there is always somebody willing to buy or sell. And futures trading, both "short" and "long", allows the "real" traders to reduce the risk of shifts in the market.

It was the Baltic Exchange when I was involved in trading some grain futures, as a farmer who was growing the stuff.

A Bitcoin exchange is nothing like that. There's no core reality. And that is a danger. But exchanges need speculation.

Oscar Wilde said it all

If there is one thing worse than being talked about, it is not being talked about.