Posts by Dave Bell 2133 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Sep 2007
It's quite possible to cover fifty miles off-road with a 50-year-old Land Rover. It's not problem-free, and the US government, for some reason, doesn't like Land Rovers. And it's close to a hundred years since the British Army started swanning around deserts in motor cars. Ground clearance and gear ratios matter more than four-wheel drive.
MicroSD or second SIM? I can't really say I've ever seen a need for the second SIM, but having the choice is good. What it's more important to me is whether I can receive a decent signal, and an aluminium case looks a bit suspect. But reviewers never seem to see that sort of problem. Maybe they never get out of the urban jungle?
As for the pixel count of the camera, and low-light abilities, "ye canna break the laws of physics". There are hard limits to optical systems and to the sensors. Just to get a lens and sensor into that package almost feels like a miracle. And the smaller the sensor-element, the higher the light level has to be. That's why a 4MP sensor works with less light than a 20MP sensor. Add the optical effects, which have been known since Victorian times. and anything in the scene small enough to match one pixel is likely getting its image smeared over several.
That needn't be bad. The way the colour image is recorded, with a colour filter for each pixel, that blurring could still be invisible in the colour image.
But I'm old enough to have used Kodachrome, and I know what optical limits mean for a high-resolution sensor. I got the nice bright colours, though Agfachrome did the greens better. But I used it with both a cheap camera from Boots and with a Leica.
I'm seeing a pattern here. Do tech reviewers care about the tech, or just about the shiny?
The big changes have been in the weapons, otherwise we could pitch an F-35 against a Spitfire and it wouldn't be a foregone conclusion.
But that means something like the A-10, with a soldier on the ground picked out target with a laser marker, could be flying high over the battlefield and dropping more bombs or missiles than the F-35 can carry. Though if the enemy has long-range air-defence the A-10 would be far too visible.
The F-35 could do that job, but the constraints set by the aircraft on weapon-size and weight are a problem. Somebody is getting paid more to make smaller bombs: not useless bombs, but the accuracy they need is expensive.
I've just bought a second-hand Nexus 5.
Single SIM, no MicroSD, so these new phones could be a better deal.
But I get much stronger WiFi and Mobile signals, which means mobile internet is actually usable around where I live and work..
Reading between the lines, the phones aren't being reviewed, this is just a report of the initial announcement.
But I wonder if anyone even bothers to try to check the performance. If you can't get a reliable signal, and you don't tell people, you're not selling a mobile phone, you're selling a mobile brick.
I was at the Worldcon in London, a year ago, and the tech worked well, but here up North, still with good coverage according to the maps, about all you could do with the same hardware was get voice.
I don't plan on spending more money any time soon, but if these phones have badly designed radio tech in them, it doesn't matter how wonderful the other features are.
I used to be a customer.
Rather, I used to be a customer of a company they bought, which was sort of OK, but whose usage meters never worked.
That company never seemed this incompetent, but I never heard anything from either about IPv6. I'm not sorry I moved, Some of the boys in the internet business are so wide that it's a long walk round them.
As far as writing, in any volume, goes, I switched to Scrivener, but for smaller documents, such as letters, there isn't so much to choose between Word, Open Office, and Libre Office.
The publishing industry uses Word a lot. Microsoft got a lock-in there with the edit-tracking. That's something that many people don't seem to realise. Books have a lot of small changes after the manuscript is submitted, and keeping track matters.
As with your example, fine details can matter. Mostly-compatible change-tracking isn't going to be good enough, if you need that.
Of course, Open Office and Libre Office have the big advantage of not being tied to Windows. And they don't use Microsoft's weird file-system "standard".
But Scrivener is cool.
I live a mile from a motorway, in an area with solid green coverage for voice, 3G, and 4G.
Data is useless, voice coverage patchy. While this is a rural area, I get the same lousy sugnal outside the local Tesco.
Add to that the way the map doesn't even show something as fundamental as the woods and built-up areas. You can infer the presence of houses from the clusters of roads, but the trees also affect signals. and they have a habit of growing.
Conclusion: Ofcom are giving us the exaggerated claims of salesmen, with a flimsy veneer of official authority.
And where is there any site which tells us how sensitive is the hardware on sale to us. Maybe the iPhone would deserve a 5* rating for its aerial, maybe my phablet is solidly 1*, but can we ever know? And I am sure we all remember the complaints about new iPhone models and their reception performance.
The mobile phone business seems to have a surfeit of liars.
When a headline says "999 calls" I think of members of the public, maybe in some distress from what they are witnessing, calling for help. I am thinking of a two-way conversation in which a skilled member of staff at a dedicated call centre calms the desperate, elicits the information to send aid, and passes the information on to the appropriate emergency service.
This article seems to be about what happens next, the imformations flow between the professionals involved.
I have been in some bad situations myself. The thought that my life and health might depend on a frantic tweet from a member of the public is not reassuring.
I would have words with your headline writer.
Since the BBC report did say somebody had been bitten, that is an angle that needs checking. Did the fox have rabies? And if it did how did it get infected? But the failure to mention that risk is one of the things that can be counted against conspiracy claims. And if the report of somebody being bitten is true, the "think of the children" angle isn't stupid
There's been some pretty bogus claims about foxes. Most of the pressure to control them seems to come from people who do things like breeding pheasants to be released, bewildered, as targets for a "shooting estate". The biosecurity scares for chicken farming means that physical, essentially passive, security need to be used, and it all stops the foxes.
When I was in the farming business, there were some people who, frankly, scared me. I've had idiots with guns, out shooting game, walk out of the fog while I have been applying pesticides to a field. They didn't even bother to check whether any work was planned. And many hunts seem to be getting along better without foxes. There are people who enjoy the challenging riding across country, but don't want to kill anything.
And the sociopaths of this government—how else can you describe some Ministers without vulgarity—have revived the issue. The Countryside March was about a lot of things governments do to mess up rural people, but why have they latched on to the ability to kill foxes as the one they can fix?
And the ugly reality of wildlife is that local excesses of any species leads to lead to deaths from disease. Remember the urban foxes of Bristol? A wonderful documentary, but then they got thinned out by a disease outbreak.
The best I ever managed with the MS support scammers was to tell them that my IP address was 127.0.0.1
These days, all I have to do is politely ask them for the IP address of the machine that's sending the reports they claim to have received, and they hang up on me.
I still get possibly non-scam calls asking for people who haven't lived at this address for fifteen years.
Actually, they haven't lived anywhere, period.
I have some knowledge of statistics, and this depends a huge amount on how you select the people in the sample. Do it right, and you could get useful results from a smaller survey than you think. But there are also some obvious questions on the selection process that Which do need to answer (or which journalists haven't paid attention to when they read the report).
On what I have seen for myself, the advertising is not always as clear as the ISPs are claiming.
Neither side in this argument has clean hands. I live in a rural area, I get good speed for my line length, and I do now have the option of fibre-to-the-cabinet. I am not confident that any of the ISPs have a reliable connection between the exchange and the rest of the internet. It's not the raw speed that gives me problems with the stuff I do.
If the internal hardware is standard, and the bare 2.5 drive can be bought, somebody will be thinking of a small RAID box. Is USB 3.0 really fast enough?
On the other hand:
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."
Andrew S. Tanenbaum
The technology has changed, but it it's still something to think about. And maybe it's a lot more secure than the internet.
The basic problem isn't new, and the double-port lead, one just for power, was usual for the earlier portable drives. But now there is more stuff using USB. And some portables don't even have two USB connectors.
I could see an extension cable working to extend either the data or the power input, so you could get power from a car lighter-socket. A simple idea for the show-off market: a laptop briefcase with a built-in 12v input (car electrics compatible, so the input voltage can be higher, but that's a solved problem) with a powered USB Hub that could power the drive, or recharge the computer. I might have an external power-line-only USB connector, but not the data. It starts getting complicated, but having the locked case data-secure would be a selling point.
Using a "proper" hub able to sit between the computer and the drive, and supply the drive from a single power source while handling the data at full speed the computer's port is capable of would beat a 2-to-1 lead powered from two separate devices.
On the other hand, a huge portable drive such as these is maybe a bit too many digital eggs in one basket. It's an option I would be wary of.
It's an unfortunate reality that Microsoft Word is standard software in the publishing industry. which is used for such features as change-tracking for the editing work. There is better software for organising and writing the book—Scrivener is very widely used, and not just for fiction—but Microsoft captured the market for a vital stage of the process.
The first work I ever had published needed a major change: a scene had to be cut out that was rather well-written, I thought, but did nothing to advance the plot. And then there are the spooling meatsteaks that would pass any spelling-check program.
If you think we don't need editors, go buy cheap Kindle books.
The SNP didn't put candidates into every constituency in the UK. so the 4.7% figure is very misleading. Round figures, Scotland is 1/12 of the total UK population, so that 4.7% of the total UK votes is around 55% of the Scotland total.
I'm wondering if I got that wrong now, there's a couple of reasons it's only a good guess. Checking for the Scotland results with the BBC, and the SNP got 50% of the Scots vote, a 30% swing in their favour, and 56 seats out of 59.
When I first saw the handwringing about the 4.7% it was from a Conservative. It was entangled with English Votes for English Laws. It's all part of the routine misleading use of statistics to score political points.
If that "Australian" voting system had been passed in that referendum, it wouldn't have made much difference, not when the SNP ended up with 50% of the vote in an FPTP system. Some SNP MPs would have been elected without second-choices even coming into play. And the low-ranked parties in Scots seats didn't generally get enough votes to make up the difference between the top 2 parties in a seat.
(People could have voted differently in a transferable vote system that sort of guesswork can lead to whatever result you want.)
If you want to look like an idiot, carry on talking about the 4.7& of the national vote that the SNP got.
The local village effectively has two names, one short and the other the full formal name.
The Post Office has an address finder: enter the postcode and you get the short-name address.
It looks, from the election mail I have received, that the electoral roll uses the long form, and the software used to resolve address differences just prints both forms of the placename.
That's a minor enough problem, the mail will get through, but it leaves me wondered if the electoral roll is being maintained in accord with the responsibilities laid out in the Data Protection Acts. So what, I mutter, nobody seems to bother with that anyway.
Railways are the original for all modern safety cultures.
I hope nobody has forgotten the lessons learned at such cost in life. But even in the 1930s the trains were faster than standard block working could handle, and high-speed expresses needed special procedures.
If the bean counters have subverted the railways, we're in trouble.
That's pretty standard, and the password they send you is temporary. There are better ways, but how is your email set up? Whether it's a temporary password or a link, how secure is the customer's email?
I'm a little more concerned about step 5, which you didn't quote:
3. This will trigger a new temporary password
4. Use this to log back into the page
5. If you wish you can change this to something more memorable under the account menu
It looks like there might be different versions of the email. The email I got is consistent with the temporary password being displayed to you via https. But I would still change it: the 5th instruction is a bit too vague.
It does make sense to send it by email, since they ask you for the account's email address.
Incidentally, the 5% return is pretty decent as these things go. A certain supermarket only returns 1%. So they're not so bad.
That's the first I had heard of a bankruptcy filing. I've been seeing OnLive suggested as a solution for games I play, though it seemed to be a tradeoff between computer power and connection quality. And I saw no mention of financial failure.
I can see why it might not be mentioned, but right now the apparent silence leaves me sceptical about what you say. It's all a bit academic now, but if you're going to say such things, and can't give us a link to a source, are you trustworthy?
All this started 1991-92 when EU subsidy for food production switched from the produce to the land. At least it stopped the Food Mountains. The particular problem that we had in the UK was that, with farm land not taxed, there was no easily-usable central record of owners and occupiers of land. The Ordnance Survey had maps showing field sizes, but they were not always current. The Land Registry isn't complete for England. And the payment went to the occupier.
Add to that the way that MAFF ignored its advisers and required an insane level of precision in the measurement of field sizes. In a typical British arable field, the permitted error in measuring the cultivated area worked out as less than a foot, while the OS area was apparently based on the assumption of Euclidean geometry. If part of a field was setaside land, you couldn't use the OS area, and woe betide you if your measurement of the total area was larger than the claim of the year before.
At least it was a paper-based system then. And MAFF had local offices. many of which have now vanished.
Eventually, MAFF became DEFRA. The last time I went to the county agricultural show. the prime locations were occupied by supermarket chains instead of grain merchants. There were more horses than cows on the site. I remember some company that installed computer networks in offices, while a long-established machinery dealer, who my grandfather had dealt with, had gone bust over the winter.
We already had robots milking cows. We have GPS on the combine harvesters, plotting the grain yelds across the fields, and showing the places where fertiliser would be wasted.
There's a history of farmers using the high-tech tools, and overcoming the problems of computers trying to exchange information. Nitrate pollution? If it gets into the water, it's money wasted.
Those are the people who struggle with the systems the government pays for. Don't believe the image of country folk you see on TV. The incompetents are working for the government (and offering to help you).
And they have had a couple in orbit for about 8 years. So now they have one with humans able to use it, and monitor it, and it should last until the USA stops funding the ISS. And it's a big enough space to do some interesting things. It's somewhere just big enough that you can try zero-gravity with no walls within easy reach, and try ways of getting out of that situation. That's something you need to know about before you try a larger one.
The problem is that these small self-publishing businesses, under the old system, were not required to register for VAT in the UK. They were not big enough. The new system doesn't have that exemption. So they have to submit VAT returns, and the details required now for sales to the rest of the EU are difficult to obtain. There need, for instance, to be two distinct proofs of residence.
It didn't help that HMRC didn't know about the businesses that were too small to register, because they hadn't registered, and didn't tell anyone about the need to register for VAT until the last minute.
The extra admin work is expensive, and needs some major changes to the management. It may need a lot of changes to e-shop software, and I have not seen much sign of these changes appearing. The whole process appears to depend on a sudden and untested change in business computer software. It's not like the updates to income tax rates and allowances.
I've done VAT returns, and it's not that onerous a process. It didn't need a major change in the records being kept. But that was all on paper, and all the details were on the invoices. The extra details that this new system requires are a lot of extra work and complexity, with a slipshod introduction process.
There are lot of these "partner" programs sent out with free software, and it may be how some of the costs are paid, but that confusion between opt-out and opt-in, where the installer defaults to "yes" feels a bit dishonest, at best.
This software ends up using our power and processor time, competing for resources with the software we want to run.
Epic Scale says there is a standard uninstaller in the Windows Control Panel, but unless it's been changed for Windows 8, they seem to be writing about an obsolete version of Windows. And, if you can't find it, they say you can download a special uninstaller.
Can I trust them? Dishonesty or incompetence, which shall it be?
There's currently a fuss about terrorists using thermite to attack 'planes. The Air Marshall's are fretting because nobody has told them how to put the stuff out. (They're basically undercover DHS armed cops.) Luckily, igniting thermite is a little difficult, because there is no practical way of putting it out.
Or it may just be American journalists who are the idiots.
When I encountered thermite in a school chemistry lesson, the teacher used magnesium ribbon and a bunsen burner to start off the reaction, which you don't find on many airliners.
It's not so obvious in the story, but the 2024 date has been set by NASA. Since the ISS depends on reliable hardware, and some of it is getting pretty old, this may have good reasons. And since so much was set by Shuttle-era limits, we have to wonder what can be launched by 2024
There's a YouTube channel called Basil Brush Official which looks to be the right place: a clutch of new videos last Monday, promotional material for the recent live tour, and set up with a Twitter account.
It's not hard to find. I hear the YouTube owners have some sort of search engine.
There's something in the disk firmware which leaves it open to this infection. And the same openness may be necessary to Data Recovery procedures.
It would be impractical for these weaknesses to only be in drives delivered to target entities.
Non-government actors can re-program the firmware on their drives. There are people who have described the process on the web, doing such things as installing Linux on the drive's circuit board. There are programmers who still work in machine code and assembler, and can reverse-engineer the firmware.
The cat is out of the bag now. How long before malware is used for terrorism. If you can somehow install your own firmware without any need for permission or physical access, how long before every hard drive in an identifiable IP block gets trashed?
There are some similarities with the shift of EU farm subsidies from produce to land area, around 1992. Partly because the money became tied to land, and included "set-aside" reducing the area cultivated, the food mountains vanished. Farm-gate prices dropped. Land prices, purchase and rent, shot up.
I can see basic income having some of the same sorts of effect. It's all very well talking about agency, but how can we ever challenge the supermarkets?
Here in Europe we grow about three times as much wheat per hectare as the Americans. That's enough to swamp the free markets, cause a price collapse, and bankrupt the farmers.
It's not atmospheric CO2 that does that. We're using a lot of energy to produce nitrogen fertilisers, as Europeans have been doing for a century or so. For the last half-century or so we have been using pesticides to control weeds (taking nutrients from the soil) and plant diseases. All these things cost the farmer money, and excess use hits diminishing returns. Mr. Worrall can tell you all about that.
We stopped burning wheat straw in the field about a quarter-century ago. It gets cultivated into the soil and slowly rots, so it isn't good at locking up CO2. But it helps stop soil erosion from wind and rain. Some bright and fast-talking city type have bought the site of a disused sugar factory in these parts and are building a straw-fired power station. but that will take phosphates away from a farm, and they're not something you can easily synthesize. You can get phosphates in sewage sludge, but the heavy metal contamination is a problem, and the supermarkets scream and run away from food grown with that nutrient source.
Industry in general has been dumping toxic waste for centuries. And some of those things don't go away of their own accord. The North Sea is littered with reefs and sandbanks of sewage sludge contaminated by heavy metals. Compared to that, CO2 is easy to get at.
I can have a number which uses this "service", which I can put down on all those websites which ask for my phone number, and then sell it to the call-centre advertising industry.
A 5% share of the revenue will be quite sufficient. I have an old "burner" mobile I can use for this.
It wasn't until somebody mentioned the Septics that I recalled 80km was 50 miles, near enough.
In my distant youth I measured a field in Chains and Links.
And I can remember MAFF, as it was then, specifying ridiculous precision for land measurement when they introduced a new EU scheme.
Now I can get a laser rangefinder for under a hundred quid. I hope somebody remembers the difference between accuracy and precision: I am not sure the guy writing the Amazon description knows that.
BT can be a bit annoying, but I've never been sure how much of that is the retail side and how much Openreach.
They don't sell broadband under just the BT label.
On what I've seen. broadband retail generally is a business where rogues and vagabonds are commonplace. And the advertising about FTTC seems to greatly underplay the details about the changes on your side of the Master Socket.
I live in rural England.
Within a mile of a motorway junction and a trunk road.
I shall have to rely on RFC1149 for my fridge. My wi-fi won't get through a stone wall to my kitchen from the office and the trees have got a few more years of growth on them since the phone companies calculated their coverage maps.
This Internet of Things stuff is going to have to be IPv6 so I think I shall have to investigate RFC6214.
Or maybe just walk to the fridge, open the door, and look inside.
It's not too hard to find Chinese sellers playing fast and loose with the eBay system, things like misdescribing goods (and not something that could be attributed to ambiguous translation). Does eBay care? Apparently not. They don't seem to have liability for this tax dodging either.
The problem I have with the big ISPs is how they sell their service. They'll tell you what speed they can deliver over your phone line, with the usual "up to" scammery in the general advertising, but eveyone needs a decent speed to the wider internet for streaming video, and the sales side doesn't seem to have any information on that aspect. I am getting wonderful promises for FTTC, but they can't even tell you whether there will be faster delivery of the actual data you want.
One big name has actual staff and a display stand in the shopping precinct in Scunthorpe. They do sell something more than just broadband, but they must be paying a couple of hundred quid a day to get a trickle of new customers.
I want to pay for internet, not for bored, scrioted, salesthings.
Live HD video from Bloodhound is part of the pay-off for the sponsors.
I watched the last Falcon launch , and we have come a long way from the days of Apollo, when it needed a cine camera on the Saturn V, and there was no guarantee of recovering the film. We have a few, much-used, shots of the booster seperation. With Falcon, we were seeing the inside of a fuel tank, in zero gravity, live.
We expect more. The Bloodhound team are making sure they can deliver.
Meanwhile, they keep trying with Falcon, and the first successful landing of the booster on Just Read The Instructions is going to be stunning video. We don't need that video to be live but, like Apollo XI, it's something that people will remember.
But why are some people fussing about hoverboards in 2015?
It is at least possible that there are gender differences in mental abilities arising from basic biochemistry. And I know how my own medications can interact with circumstances to mess up my thinking. So gender differences are plausible, quite apart from the blatantly obvious physical. And if you're looking for unusual abilities, which you have a test for, it's foolish not to test candidates just because they're the wrong gender.
Oh, I might as well mention Rear Admiral Grace Hopper at this point.
Her career started at a time when people knew they didn't know what they wanted.
Today, recruiters are sure they know what they want.
I am not at all sure which is better.
There's so much of this, both Powers of Attorney and informal arrangements, which fits with my experience. But the banks may have improved, or at least some of them, over the handling of a PoA.
I stick with paper delivery of bank statements because it can be used as a proof of address. The whole business of proving who you are seems to rely on a jumble of possible documents. Can you prove you're entitled to work in the UK without a passport? But a passport doesn't prove your address. The whole Identity Card business of a decade ago could have been an answer to that, but it looked like an expensive boondoggle.
Incidentally, I use paper cheques so infrequently that I still have an unused chequebook that is a decade old, still with the tear-off printed address on the front (windowed envelopes) for my home at that time.
I don't know what the systems are in the USA, but in the UK we've had "private hire"—minicabs—for a long time, and the Uber service looks a lot like them. That affects the boost to the economy from Uber. We also have, in at least some place, smartphone Taxi-summoning systems, a bit like Uber but for the licensed taxis.
I suspect that some of the Uber-hype comes from the USA, and is based in an ignorance of the rest of the world.
Anyway, the electronic thumb model can make traditional taxis more efficient, and is doing. If you have the number, you've been able to summon a minicab since the first mobile phones. What's new about Uber? It's maybe a little bit easier the finding the phone number in a strange place, but how much of the wealth generated is innovation and how much is from dodging regulation?
Uber apparently doesn't like its drivers to tell insurance companies what they're using their cars for. That's not good.
The first-stage booster doesn't even get near orbit, so it's hardly vital to be able to recover it. And SpaceX already have payload return with the Dragon capsule. They're working towards man-rating the system.
But guidance to a floating barge, and crashing on it at the first attempt, does suggest some interesting possibilities. It would need o be done with something like Dragon, which already parachutes into the sea for recovery, and SpaceX have certainly done work on doing this on land. It all looks a bit of a high risk at the moment, but there are possibilities.
A lot of this story seems to have its roots in the procedures set up by the American Digital Millenium Copyright Act. Follow the processes, and a company such as YouTube is safe from being liable for damages.
Cases like this sound a bit dodgy under American law. Since a DMCA notice is made out "under penalty of perjury" is it even lawful to send out notices automatically? It would be expensive to find out.
And sometimes there are overlapping but independent rights. In music, there are distinct rights, and payments, to the songwriter and the performer. It gets complicated, and then the USA has different law (and a long-running "fuck-you" attitude to international copyright laws).
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
